A Story of How One Company Almost Earned My Business
Here is a quick little story highlighting why Twitter can be a great asset for most businesses:
Story starts off with this tweet:
I have been using the food delivery service foodler for a few months now and have had nothing but great experiences. The service makes ordering food SUPER easy, and that is obviously something that is worth while for me. A few days after that tweet I received an @reply from a competitor of Foodlers:
Grubhub did a great job of using Twitter Search to track tweets regarding their competitors. Instead of being sneaky and inauthentic, the company sent me a tweet from the company account with a nice message regarding their service. I went ahead and checked out the website and decided to give it a shot today. That right there just gave Grubhub business they would have never had before, and took away business that Foodler should have received. On top of that, Grubhub gave itself the opportunity to gain and “steal” a customer.
Unfortunately for Grubhub, their product was inferior. I don’t want to portray the service as being terrible, because it isn’t, but it just wasn’t on the same level as Foodler. The minimum order price was consistently higher than Foodlers, and the delivery time from this one order was nearly 45 minutes longer than my average Foodler order. On top of that, the personal account settings on Foodler outclass Grubhub’s.
So what did we learn here?
Grubhub did a wonderful job utilizing Twitter in a way that could have earned them a new customer. The problem was that their product wasn’t good enough to close the deal. If you are a company using Twitter in this manner, make sure your product is as good as you can make it. There are plenty of ways to improve GrubHub, and if the company were to implement some of these improvements, they can utilize Twitter even more so.
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October 30th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Hi AJ, thanks so much for trying the website. I’m sorry you were disappointed with our service, but this is great feedback. The minimum order issue is something we have realized, and we’re taking steps to fix that. You should start to see those minimum order requirements come down within the next month. It just takes a while to call all of our customers to accomplish that.
Did the delivery take 45 minutes longer than usual or was the quote on our website for estimated delivery time just wrong? We require delivery standards for all of our restaurants. I looked into your order, and this restaurant is from a new partner of ours, so we may just need to work with them to respond to orders quicker, or may need to receive better delivery time quotes.
I’d love to hear more about the personal account settings Foodler has that you think we are missing. Please send me an email (casey@grubhub.com) so we can take these into account and try to implement them in the future.
Thanks again for trying our site, and for the feedback. We really appreciate it.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:20 am
Casey, mad props to you guys for being so responsive to what folks say about you online. Cheers!
November 2nd, 2008 at 10:42 am
The idea is to offer an alternative that offers at least the same as the competitor. So the recommendation for them will be to keep using twitter, but to improve their service in order to make the switch permanent.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:00 am
The fact that GrubHub continues to stick with this to improve the service is fantastic! So many businesses miss out on growth simply because they become childish when met with criticism. Congrats on the real-time business class — I hope other businesses take note.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:03 am
Well I’d say that grubhub is doing things right because they responded to this blogpost and your tweet. They at least see the opportunity that social media provides and are trying to get involved. If they continue to do this and gather information I have a feeling foodler may just fall behind in the long run.
It’s great to see small business effectively using these services. I wonder when big business will get on board?
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:34 am
Very cool that these small businesses are monitoring the social media airwaves. Even if they don’t have all the kinks worked out of their business, they are focusing on customer service through social media which is great. Monitoring twitter and probably a google blog search, they were able to get relevant feedback on how to improve their competition. Casey’s response sounds very sincere and transparent which is key.
If they put this much effort into creating tip top delivery times, they sound well on their way to eating up marketshare.
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Great article and a great example by GrubHub of how to communicate using social media, especially down here in the comments.
dm
November 8th, 2008 at 4:03 am
Hey AJ,
Wow, after I read this it hit me like a light bulb. I’m currently tracking keywords on Twitter for my business. You can use Tweet Beep to track keywords on Twitter similar to how Google Alerts works.
Anyways, I never even though of tracking my competitors’ keywords. It’s a very smart idea and one that I will implement right away. Thanks so much for sharing this great, authentic, and relationship building strategy.
How was the internship (referring to your About me)?
- Jun Loayza
November 28th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Hey AJ,
What a great way to use Twitter to battle competition. You have to love capitalism.