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Q&A: GrubHub chief on customer-service partnerships

Crain's Chicago Business August 18, 2009
By Steve Hendershot

Chicago, IL--As founder of GrubHub.com, a Web site that connects diners with restaurants that offer delivery, Mike Evans faces some unique business challenges.

He has to run a service-oriented business and build a recognizable brand even though his customers' only face-to-face encounters during their transactions are with delivery people who work for the restaurants.

Crain's contributor Steve Hendershot asked Mr. Evans how he maintains quality and consistency.

Crain's: How do you make sure your customers have positive and consistent experiences when the people who are ultimately cooking for them and interacting with them don't work for GrubHub?

Mike Evans: People make the assumption that because we're translating orders from multiple restaurants, the service might be inconsistent, but we make sure that it's the same.

What most people out of their service experience is for things to go well. And then, if they don't, they want a good channel of communication back to someone who can take responsibility. That's the essence of good service, and it's something we can do well. We have people ready to talk to the diners if they have questions or problems before, during and after the order. And then we provide live chat, a traditional 800 number and we monitor Twitter so we can respond immediately to a complaint.

We're really good at getting communication back from our diners and then communicating it back to the person at the restaurant who it really matters to. If you think the driver was rude, you can call the restaurant and you may or may not get a manager. But you can do live chat with GrubHub, and we can give that feedback to restaurateur, who always wants it.

Crain's: At a restaurant, if something goes wrong, the manager makes it right. But when something goes wrong with a GrubHub meal, you take responsibility. If it's the restaurant's fault, who foots the bill for resolving the problem?

ME: We take care of the customer just like you would see in a restaurant. We try to provide that same level of service. But how that happens isn't going to be transparent to customers because they don't want to see us get in an argument with our restaurant. But we take care of our customer and then handle things on the back end as appropriate.

Crain's: You introduced a GrubHub iPhone application earlier this year. Why were you concerned about consistency of experience between the Web site and the app?

ME: Working in a different channel doesn't really intimidate us. It was really a marketing question: How many people would we reach with an iPhone app as opposed to an Android app or by printing menus and distributing them? But creating an app that gives diners the ability to place an order over an iPhone instead of a computer is not that difficult technically, and the experience really is not that different from the Web site.

And for our demographic, people who make food choices between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., if we have the ability to get them to think about placing an order for delivery while they're on the Red Line on their way home, that's a no-brainer. We try to provide as many choices as possible.