Instacart offers in-app support on a global scale with UJET

Instacart removes the time and inconvenience of grocery shopping and gives it back to customers. As an on-demand service, it also offers the opportunity for people to supplement their incomes by picking groceries from a wide selection of stores and delivering them to customers’ doors. Instacart services over 4,000 cities across all 50 U.S. states. It is also available in over 70% of the households in Canada. This success lead to a $7 billion valuation.

Instacart Shoppers, consisting of part-time employees and contractors, use Instacart’s Shopper app to accept and deliver Instacart orders. Shoppers are on-the-go and mobile, meaning they rarely turn to a laptop or desktop to contact support. Every interaction a Shopper has with customer support is through a smartphone. To deliver orders on-time, it was important that Instacart supplied its Shoppers with a mobile-focused, reliable, and streamlined customer support experience.

Instacart uses over 100,000 Shoppers, supported by more than 1,000 agents across the world. With potentially 100 Shoppers per agent, it was essential that agents provided support for Shoppers without causing Instacart order delays. This meant multichannel support and scalability to meet its rapidly growing Shopper organization.

Native In-App Mobile Support

To enable Shoppers with the best available mobile support, Instacart would need to natively integrate support into the Shopper app and connect with its customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Instacart understood UJET’s commitment to mobile-focused customer support and saw the opportunity to leverage in-app voice and chat capabilities of the UJET platform.

Integrating the UJET mobile SDK with the Instacart Shopper app would give Instacart support more options to accurately and intelligently route support issues. By using customer data reports from the UJET platform, it would create specific user segmentation sorted by urgency to get the high priority issues solved in a minimal amount of time.

Agents would also take advantage of Shopper profile information aggregation, supplied by UJET, to have Shopper information before answering a support request. Leveraging customer data would help optimize Instacart’s customer support strategy.

Instacart’s partnership with UJET would also include working together to create new features as different challenges were discovered. Rather than wait for a feature, both companies would actively discuss the viability of new feature development.

True Mobile Customer Support Experience

Instacart integrated the UJET mobile SDK into the Shopper app, enabling voice and chat for the first time. After full SDK integration, Instacart agents were able to reduce repeat customer contact by 5.6 percent for in-app voice and by 4.6 percent for in-app chat. Instacart was also able to maintain its high CSAT score even with more support traffic in the app. Total in-app resolution times are 30 percent shorter than Instacart’s previous support solution.

Through the use of customer data, Instacart optimized support request routing even further. Support requests through IVR are intelligently routed providing personalized customer journeys and aggregating more information, like live order status, for agents before answering support calls.

A Digital Transformation for Customer Support

There are a lot of potential paths that modern, mobile support can take. But the partnership between Instacart and UJET has created a blueprint for mobile-focused customer support. Instead of building tools and features that might be necessary, Instacart and UJET are continuously iterating to identify new and innovative ways to connect with customers and shoppers.

Instacart’s goal was to offer Shoppers an entire shopping and support experience on mobile. With UJET, the company has been able to deploy voice and chat natively in the Shopper app. Instacart Shoppers rely on the branded app to complete orders  and any experienced Shopper delay would ripple into Instacart customer orders. Since Shoppers are constantly on-the-go, it was paramount that they used a platform that combined all aspects of the business in a single app.

Instacart required a true mobile-focused customer support partnership. They saw a need to innovate and improve its customer support and by working with UJET, Instacart can continue growing its business with confidence, knowing that customer support will always be there for its customers and Shoppers on the channels they prefer.

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