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While it scratches my 'lazy don't want to move' itch pretty well, I find Postmates pretty awful. Customer service is just dreadful. I once ordered food from a

While it scratches my 'lazy don't want to move' itch pretty well, I find Postmates pretty awful. Customer service is just dreadful. I once ordered food from a place maybe 10-15 blocks away. It took ~hours~ for the food to arrive because the delivery driver decided to take an hour phone call right down the street, food in hand. We had to go find him, as support was non-existent. A little while later they offered to credit $3 for the issue: not even covering the delivery fee we paid to go hunt down our own food. This is a typical experience: anytime anything goes wrong Postmates support is worthless.

Macsenour 9y ago
There are a lot of these types of services and if I were at one, I would make customer service my hallmark. This seems like a no brainer to me, and yet it seems farther down the priority list for most of these delivery companies. Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
- icelancer 9y ago
  >>Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc. Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong. The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it). In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc. It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is. EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
  - bearcobra 9y ago
    What did it take for you to get it to that point? Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help?
    - icelancer 9y ago
      >>What did it take for you to get it to that point? Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not. >>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help? I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful. As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News. Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution.
  - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
    It's odd how few CEOs figure this out and bake it into the DNA of their company. There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      >>customer obsession is #1. Their straight-up customer support is outsourced, but works well enough from a scaling perspective. Given how large the company is, I also agree that they get an A- at worst. But more importantly, their domination of logistics is a truly impressive feat. There is a constant flow of articles on HN, reddit, and everywhere else about how Amazon's prices are no longer the cheapest and how they are a monopoly and how you should shop around and JET.com and blah blah. No one cares that it's not the cheapest. It's almost like people forgot that 10 years ago, buying things online and dealing with horrendous shipping was a nightmare, complete pain in the ass, and took forever. Amazon decided to grab USPS by the neck and make them work Sundays (how do you get a government institution to do that?!) and develop their own logistics network to deliver many items same-day, or even within an hour. It's truly an amazing feat that puts customers' minds at ease; there is no wonder why there is such loyalty to Amazon. Solving that customer problem is like an act of God to the masses.
- cdolan 9y ago
  For one, good customer service is hard. Also, customer service in that space is costly, particularly because these businesses already operate at a loss to gain market share.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  People expect customer service (or depending on the business 'support') but typically are not willing to pay for it.
- pmthrowaway 9y ago
  I used to work for Postmates Customer Service. The environment is a boiler room staffed with under-qualified and normally unemployable people with an extremely high churn rate due to immature "management" (people who never learned how to manage in their lives) and a vindictive CEO. I am not surprised their customer service has gone further downhill.
  - expostmatescs 9y ago
    I was a team lead for Postmates CS and I can confirm this. They have serious quality, training, and performance evaluation problems. Conway's law is pretty evident there in that the lack of care for customers is reflected in the lack of engagement between management and the agents and team leads.
  - Macsenour 9y ago
    I have noticed over the years that good customer service comes from the top down. If the CEO doesn't give a crap, that attitude slides downhill to the people actually talking to customers. I'm not sure which which service for finding cheap airline tickets was posted here, HN will jump on this for me I'm sure, but I recall them saying from day 1 that CS was their focus. As I set up my own service based business I got a CS phone number and when asked why before I have customers, I said: "We need to be ready to respond to issues long before we're needed".
- whbk 9y ago
  UberEats has been pretty amazing for me support-wise. They've always made it right when I've had issues - and there typically aren't issues. I use it a ton - 3+ times/week - and of those times I've had issues, only 2 required me pushing them to do the right thing, and one of those was when I was traveling in Stockholm where they'd just rolled it out. Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee." The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service. Yes, I am Mad On The Internet.
  - diogenescynic 9y ago
    UberEats grosses me out though. I've been in way too many Uberpools where the driver has food on the floor of the front seat and asks the passengers to not step on the food... Just doesn't seem sanitary. At least the other services seem to have insulated bags for transportation.
    - pbarnes_1 9y ago
      This is horrifying. Are you sure it was an UberEats order and not their own lunch or something?
      - diogenescynic 9y ago
- troydavis 9y ago
  > Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? You may disagree (for yourself as a customer), but there's no reason to believe your preference is held by a majority of the total addressable market (by user count or profit margin), let alone that everyone else has a blind spot. It may be that relatively few users share your willingness to pay for support (which seems very possible to me), or even that they've tested different approaches to support and measured how much support actually affects a customer's future purchases - ie, revealed preferences/values. In that case, it wouldn't be a blind spot, it would be that they have better data than any of us do.
- mcrad 9y ago
  > Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? I find that companies driven more by hubris and marketing's version of data science, are inherently opposed to boots-on-the-ground service operations. Is the company's valuation driven by its customers or by promises to investors? I don't Postmates but I suspect it's the later. It's almost as if the more you focus on the customer, the more you expose the weaknesses and assumptions built into a years-old sketch of a business plan. So the customer issues get swept under the rug.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  One of the things I've noticed is that everyone focuses on new users, to the detriment of existing users. They don't care if 10 users leave if 50 are on-boarding. What they typically don't realize is that those 50 are going to leave too, but hey, at least they have big numbers for their reports!
covercash 9y ago
Postmates support used to be great - call a number from within the app, talk to a real person, get your issue resolved while on the phone. Now their support is almost nonexistent. I've also noticed their emails trying to get me to refer friends have increased to almost daily. Which is obnoxious. And they aren't even good deals - get 5 friends to order within a week for $15 delivery credit? It used to be I get $10 credit, my friend got $10 credit. I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver. A year ago they delivered food right to my hospital room. I'm about to head back in for an extended stay, so I'm hoping they still do that. 2015 Postmates was great. 2017 Postmates is almost useless.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver. This is basically every order on Postmates at this point. No one is actually paying their insane delivery fees. I worked as a driver for a few weeks in Berkeley and it was like clockwork. Postmates sends out a free credit promo, get a bunch of ultra cheap short orders, and make like $6 to deliver someone an Iced Tea. There's no possible way the economics can work out for this.
  - in_cahoots 9y ago
    Sounds like they're trying to artificially inflate their metrics to keep investors happy. New customers and more orders = growth, even if they're burning a ton of cash to get it.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  > Postmates support used to be great - call a number from within the app, talk to a real person, get your issue resolved while on the phone. Now their support is almost nonexistent. Pretty much says that they are walking dead. As a service business, service is the only differentiation and it costs. That is why these businesses spend huge amounts of time on process to minimize service problems, monitoring and metrics to get to problems before they become service issues, and then maximizing the likelihood that a service call can be resolved satisfactorily in short order. It does not sound like they have internalized any of those requirements.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I threaten to chargeback when a company doesn't take responsibility for their goofs. Works every time. In this case, after 60 minutes or so, I'd just call up and say, "it's been 1 hour since the meal was picked up. If you don't refund my money I'm charging back." (Edit) I should add that I only threaten about once every 5-6 years, and it needs to be obvious that the company is just not taking responsibility for their goofs. It's not something that I do because the delivery boy showed up 5 minutes late.
- joeskyyy 9y ago
  Funny enough, I did this with Postmates once. I ordered a meal which Postmates estimated to be ~$16. When they finally billed me it was charged at $32. When I contacted them they told me that the prices reflected aren't always accurate, but I'd say a price going up double is a bit of a goof on their part. They were unwilling to refund the payment, and so I called my bank and explained the situation. The bank associate on the phone took care of the charge back as a measure against them. After that, I've never ordered from postmates again. I get that prices can vary, I'd forgive it to a certain degree. But double the price? Nope.
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    Similar happened to me. Since then stuck with prime now for restaurants since the cost is set in stone and as far as I can tell, drivers can't decide to bail out if it's a delivery they don't want.
nraynaud 9y ago
I had my first experience with them yesterday, we paid $70 for 2 pizzas 1 mile away. More precisely the "total" is $60 on the page and $70 in the tip popup, so I guess we'll get charged the later. People online think it might be an outdated menu price in their system (they have employees all the time going in the shop and nobody takes a picture of the flyer to fix the prices?), but there is no exact and reliable explanation anywhere. Next time we'll find another delivery service, that one looks scamy.
- Operyl 9y ago
  So, well, couriers aren’t employees and they don’t have time to do things like this. Customers are extremely vindicative for every minute they perceive as wasted. Time is money, unfortunately.
  - nraynaud 9y ago
    yeah, the hole business model would be very hard to salvage.

Macsenour 9y ago

There are a lot of these types of services and if I were at one, I would make customer service my hallmark. This seems like a no brainer to me, and yet it seems farther down the priority list for most of these delivery companies. Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?

icelancer 9y ago
>>Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc. Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong. The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it). In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc. It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is. EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
- bearcobra 9y ago
  What did it take for you to get it to that point? Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help?
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >>What did it take for you to get it to that point? Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not. >>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help? I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful. As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News. Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution.
- lawnchair_larry 9y ago
  It's odd how few CEOs figure this out and bake it into the DNA of their company. There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >>customer obsession is #1. Their straight-up customer support is outsourced, but works well enough from a scaling perspective. Given how large the company is, I also agree that they get an A- at worst. But more importantly, their domination of logistics is a truly impressive feat. There is a constant flow of articles on HN, reddit, and everywhere else about how Amazon's prices are no longer the cheapest and how they are a monopoly and how you should shop around and JET.com and blah blah. No one cares that it's not the cheapest. It's almost like people forgot that 10 years ago, buying things online and dealing with horrendous shipping was a nightmare, complete pain in the ass, and took forever. Amazon decided to grab USPS by the neck and make them work Sundays (how do you get a government institution to do that?!) and develop their own logistics network to deliver many items same-day, or even within an hour. It's truly an amazing feat that puts customers' minds at ease; there is no wonder why there is such loyalty to Amazon. Solving that customer problem is like an act of God to the masses.
cdolan 9y ago
For one, good customer service is hard. Also, customer service in that space is costly, particularly because these businesses already operate at a loss to gain market share.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
People expect customer service (or depending on the business 'support') but typically are not willing to pay for it.
pmthrowaway 9y ago
I used to work for Postmates Customer Service. The environment is a boiler room staffed with under-qualified and normally unemployable people with an extremely high churn rate due to immature "management" (people who never learned how to manage in their lives) and a vindictive CEO. I am not surprised their customer service has gone further downhill.
- expostmatescs 9y ago
  I was a team lead for Postmates CS and I can confirm this. They have serious quality, training, and performance evaluation problems. Conway's law is pretty evident there in that the lack of care for customers is reflected in the lack of engagement between management and the agents and team leads.
- Macsenour 9y ago
  I have noticed over the years that good customer service comes from the top down. If the CEO doesn't give a crap, that attitude slides downhill to the people actually talking to customers. I'm not sure which which service for finding cheap airline tickets was posted here, HN will jump on this for me I'm sure, but I recall them saying from day 1 that CS was their focus. As I set up my own service based business I got a CS phone number and when asked why before I have customers, I said: "We need to be ready to respond to issues long before we're needed".
whbk 9y ago
UberEats has been pretty amazing for me support-wise. They've always made it right when I've had issues - and there typically aren't issues. I use it a ton - 3+ times/week - and of those times I've had issues, only 2 required me pushing them to do the right thing, and one of those was when I was traveling in Stockholm where they'd just rolled it out. Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee." The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service. Yes, I am Mad On The Internet.
- diogenescynic 9y ago
  UberEats grosses me out though. I've been in way too many Uberpools where the driver has food on the floor of the front seat and asks the passengers to not step on the food... Just doesn't seem sanitary. At least the other services seem to have insulated bags for transportation.
  - pbarnes_1 9y ago
    This is horrifying. Are you sure it was an UberEats order and not their own lunch or something?
    - diogenescynic 9y ago
troydavis 9y ago
> Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? You may disagree (for yourself as a customer), but there's no reason to believe your preference is held by a majority of the total addressable market (by user count or profit margin), let alone that everyone else has a blind spot. It may be that relatively few users share your willingness to pay for support (which seems very possible to me), or even that they've tested different approaches to support and measured how much support actually affects a customer's future purchases - ie, revealed preferences/values. In that case, it wouldn't be a blind spot, it would be that they have better data than any of us do.
mcrad 9y ago
> Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? I find that companies driven more by hubris and marketing's version of data science, are inherently opposed to boots-on-the-ground service operations. Is the company's valuation driven by its customers or by promises to investors? I don't Postmates but I suspect it's the later. It's almost as if the more you focus on the customer, the more you expose the weaknesses and assumptions built into a years-old sketch of a business plan. So the customer issues get swept under the rug.
CaptSpify 9y ago
One of the things I've noticed is that everyone focuses on new users, to the detriment of existing users. They don't care if 10 users leave if 50 are on-boarding. What they typically don't realize is that those 50 are going to leave too, but hey, at least they have big numbers for their reports!

covercash 9y ago

Postmates support used to be great - call a number from within the app, talk to a real person, get your issue resolved while on the phone. Now their support is almost nonexistent. I've also noticed their emails trying to get me to refer friends have increased to almost daily. Which is obnoxious. And they aren't even good deals - get 5 friends to order within a week for $15 delivery credit? It used to be I get $10 credit, my friend got $10 credit. I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver. A year ago they delivered food right to my hospital room. I'm about to head back in for an extended stay, so I'm hoping they still do that. 2015 Postmates was great. 2017 Postmates is almost useless.

aphextron 9y ago
>I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver. This is basically every order on Postmates at this point. No one is actually paying their insane delivery fees. I worked as a driver for a few weeks in Berkeley and it was like clockwork. Postmates sends out a free credit promo, get a bunch of ultra cheap short orders, and make like $6 to deliver someone an Iced Tea. There's no possible way the economics can work out for this.
- in_cahoots 9y ago
  Sounds like they're trying to artificially inflate their metrics to keep investors happy. New customers and more orders = growth, even if they're burning a ton of cash to get it.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
> Postmates support used to be great - call a number from within the app, talk to a real person, get your issue resolved while on the phone. Now their support is almost nonexistent. Pretty much says that they are walking dead. As a service business, service is the only differentiation and it costs. That is why these businesses spend huge amounts of time on process to minimize service problems, monitoring and metrics to get to problems before they become service issues, and then maximizing the likelihood that a service call can be resolved satisfactorily in short order. It does not sound like they have internalized any of those requirements.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I threaten to chargeback when a company doesn't take responsibility for their goofs. Works every time. In this case, after 60 minutes or so, I'd just call up and say, "it's been 1 hour since the meal was picked up. If you don't refund my money I'm charging back." (Edit) I should add that I only threaten about once every 5-6 years, and it needs to be obvious that the company is just not taking responsibility for their goofs. It's not something that I do because the delivery boy showed up 5 minutes late.

joeskyyy 9y ago
Funny enough, I did this with Postmates once. I ordered a meal which Postmates estimated to be ~$16. When they finally billed me it was charged at $32. When I contacted them they told me that the prices reflected aren't always accurate, but I'd say a price going up double is a bit of a goof on their part. They were unwilling to refund the payment, and so I called my bank and explained the situation. The bank associate on the phone took care of the charge back as a measure against them. After that, I've never ordered from postmates again. I get that prices can vary, I'd forgive it to a certain degree. But double the price? Nope.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Similar happened to me. Since then stuck with prime now for restaurants since the cost is set in stone and as far as I can tell, drivers can't decide to bail out if it's a delivery they don't want.

nraynaud 9y ago

I had my first experience with them yesterday, we paid $70 for 2 pizzas 1 mile away. More precisely the "total" is $60 on the page and $70 in the tip popup, so I guess we'll get charged the later. People online think it might be an outdated menu price in their system (they have employees all the time going in the shop and nobody takes a picture of the flyer to fix the prices?), but there is no exact and reliable explanation anywhere. Next time we'll find another delivery service, that one looks scamy.

Operyl 9y ago
So, well, couriers aren’t employees and they don’t have time to do things like this. Customers are extremely vindicative for every minute they perceive as wasted. Time is money, unfortunately.
- nraynaud 9y ago
  yeah, the hole business model would be very hard to salvage.