Just Eat & Online Food Marketplaces: Onboarding Restaurants

What exactly did you differently at Just Eat, in terms of the onboarding process and the care that you gave to the suppliers?

Actually, the first thing I remember seeing was, we would go on a Monday and we would speak to a restaurant and we would get them really excited about it. “You don’t have to do your own marketing; we’ll do it all for you.” “You’re going to reach a consumer base you could never do before.” When we initially started that, that got them very excited and they wanted to sign. We were competitive in the market and we had to make sure that was the case. But when they’d sign, it’s a fine balance between the moment they sign and the moment they go live. You’ve spoken to the owner, they’re really excited, they’re telling their staff members. But at the beginning, we had anything from a 15 day to a 30-day time to online – from the moment you spoke to a salesperson, to the moment you went live on a platform.

You can probably appreciate, after that time, two or three weeks have passed, then you’re live. Were you made aware that you were live? We weren’t the best at that, at the beginning. Secondly, a consumer ordered and it would probably take two or three bad experiences, until they realized they were online and we realized we had to get a lot better at that. Then we started seeing some churn. We started seeing bad customer experiences but then you would see the restaurant owner say, “Look, you didn’t tell me I was live. I didn’t have the team prepared. I’ve got this influx of orders; you’re making me look bad.”

That, very much, was learning at the beginning. We knew we had to get it a lot more robust. Why is it taking 15 to 30 days? At the beginning, we had sales people doing the admin. So the sales people would go and sign 30, 40, 50 restaurants, and then they’ll go home, go on our internal system, upload the documents. I love sales people to bits but, let’s be frank, sales people are not the best administrators. They would be doing that and that’s what would cause the delay.

So we said, let’s create a sales support function. Let’s have the teams on the field work with an inhouse person. They can sign the restaurant and then the person inhouse takes care of it. The sales support team are the individuals who follow through. They took the documents, made them live, make the phone call – the onboarding live call. They would phone them up and say, “You are live now. Expect orders on this date. Are you comfortable going live on this date?” Sometimes, we would sign them on a Monday and we’d tell them they were ready to go live and they would tell us that Thursday, Friday and Saturday were their busy days and they’d prefer to go live on a Monday or a Tuesday, so they could warm up to it.

Following through from that, you’d then to go to week one, week two. You’d check how it was going and if everything was okay. Every single restaurant was very much, “I’m live now; I should be getting a lot of orders.” And the trick, in the early days, was to just put them on top of the search and they would get a lot of orders at the beginning. And/or, if you were comfortable that they were the right type of restaurant, in the right type of demographic, we didn’t put them on top, but we would catch up with them in a week or two and they would tell us that they hadn’t received any orders and what was happening. We’d put them on the top and then it would increase. Actually, that became a revenue stream for us, a little later on. But I think a big thing for us was creating that sales support function, which then merged into an account management team. That, in conjunction with the sales team, was very, very powerful for us.