This is a guest post by Jyotsna (Jo) Pattabiraman, Founder/CEO of Grow Fit, and Arpit Goyal, Head of Engineering at Grow Fit
Grow Fit prevents lifestyle disease through a combination of data science, medical science, and behavioral insights. With over 300 million Indians at risk of lifestyle disease, we believe in preventing and even reversing lifestyle disease by addressing its root causes – nutrition, stress, sleep, and activity – through a combination of expert advice and customized products delivered to your doorstep. With this vision in mind, Grow Fit delivers healthy, fresh, and packaged food in Bangalore. Customers buy subscriptions online though our website and app (Android / iOS). We use a logistics ops system to process orders on a daily basis. We prepare our food fresh from scratch every day and dispatch within 30 minutes of preparation.
Problem Statement
Customers from all over Bangalore (infamous for its traffic snarls) rely on us to get their healthy food on time. Since our food is carefully calibrated customers rely on us to keep their health on track and look forward to their next meal with a great deal of anticipation. They have no workarounds since ordering from anyone else is not an option.
All the orders had to be dispatched and received within a narrow band of time. With each delivery agent having multiple mission-critical orders on his route any deviation compounded rapidly and we would get flooded with calls and messages about order status.
Since many of our customers work at large offices we would often need to deliver food to the front desk. Delivery agents used to report back that the order had been delivered but the customer was not aware of the delivery. There was no mechanism for us to know if a rider was digressing from his route or roaming around trying to find the delivery address.
We wanted a system that could notify customers of the order status in real time and help customers connect with the delivery staff if they wanted to provide delivery instructions. Centralized logistics ops and Customer Executive (CE) agents needed to know where the delivery agent was in case they had to report back to a hungry customer.
Requirements
We considered developing order tracking in-house and then came to know of HyperTrack.
Tracking experience shared with our customers
We integrated HyperTrack with our CRM to know precisely where the order is. We gave an Android app with the HyperTrack SDK to our delivery agents a live tracking dashboard to CE agents and a live order tracking link to customers.
Teething issues
Initially there were a few challenges with the system starting with behavioral change. Delivery agents and logistics ops team were not very keen on using it because it introduced a new process that made them accountable. They set up several obstacles such as not having compatible phones and data plans. Most of our delivery agents have low-end smartphones. They kept their GPS off for most of the time reporting that their batteries and data packs were rapidly draining. Uptake was limited despite offering a data plan.
Resolution
We worked with the terrific product team at HyperTrack to resolve these issues. Within days we had more efficient battery and data usage for low-end phones. With lighter data and battery spend delivery agents were incentivized to use our app.
Our logistics ops and CE teams embraced the advantages of having such a system. We have since integrated it with cloud telephony to automatically send messages to the customers for deliveries.
Now we deliver hundreds of orders a day in Bangalore using HyperTrack. Our customers are happier than ever. Our logistics team can track each order and can improve the overall experience.
Best of all this hardly took any time. We can provide a seamless experience to our internal and external customers without the overhead of maintaining a full developer team just for logistics.
Future plans
We plan to integrate a photo capture mechanism for proof when customer is not present to take delivery. And a routing algorithm is in the works. HyperTrack also provides analytics on the route which in future we hope will notify customers if the order is delayed because of traffic rain or other external conditions.
