Case Study:
Marketo integration, lead lifecycle and data hygiene
Uber Eats slims down onboarding process and nurtures restaurant partners
The business case
At a time when convenience is everything, Uber Eats leads in the food delivery category, especially in Australia. Since launching in 2016, they’ve signed up over 320,000 restaurants to the platform, satisfying hungry bellies nationally with their meal of choice. Australians enjoy the convenience of dining on their favourite multicultural cuisines, so it’s no surprise the app’s uptake was rapid. As a result, Uber Eats Australia grew ahead of much of the world. The account management and marketing teams worked hard to keep up, however they quickly needed to rely on their own initiatives to drive continued growth while still servicing their customers: restaurants on the platform.
When a restaurant signs up to the service, they become a business partner as well as a customer. Uber Eats invests in the success of each restaurant partner, providing support through data analytics, marketing opportunities and onboarding. Each new account requires manual communications from Uber Eats’ sales and account management teams in Australia. Over time, handling this fast pace resulted in ad hoc communications, with a complex tech stack in the background.
The vendor decision
Uber Eats were already using Marketo Engage, integrated with their Salesforce CRM, but they lacked internal resources to harness its potential.
Issue
To realign communications with company strategy, Connor Sinclair, Uber Eats’ Senior Restaurant Experience Manager for Australia and New Zealand, was charged with developing a clearer way of communicating and reporting engagements between Uber Eats and their restaurant partners. Connor turned to partner agency BluprintX to identify the best execution of Marketo Engage.
Solution
Connor saw Marketo Engage as a primary resource to help eliminate the increased incidence of arbitrary communications happening across different teams. He wanted to leverage the platform to introduce a centralised model that delivered a more considered and uniform voice to interactions with partner restaurants. “We needed to move at a quicker pace: the advantage of having BluprintX was their expertise and understanding of the data structure and its relationship with our external tools via Salesforce,” Connor says.
Approach
The first stage of work involved six months of in-depth analysis for BluprintX and Uber Eats. This ‘triage’ approach helped develop rules around the transfer of business knowledge and identify strategic opportunities, with Connor working closely with BluprintX to help them understand Uber Eats’ inner-workings.
“It’s no understatement that our data structure is really complicated,” says Connor. “to help them understand in terms of how we communicate with different segments; we work with small family-run restaurants through to strategic partnerships with companies like McDonald’s and it’s critical that each email connects to the needs of each restaurant partner while tying back to Uber Eats’ overall strategy.”
Together, Uber Eats and BluprintX worked through cleansing and re-cataloguing the data. From there, Connor developed a plan to create a consistent voice for communications with restaurant partners that would support the sales and account management team by automating emails they previously wrote on a case-by-case basis. “BluprintX was really exemplary in creating an understanding that we’re not simply contacting a restaurant. There’s a person behind it who’s opening our emails. We have to think about who we’re communicating to and when they should receive it.”
Objectives
- Develop a centralised, considered and strategic communications system
- Introduce marketing automation emailing
- Streamline partner restaurant onboarding
Outcomes
Since engaging with BluprintX and redesigning their use of Marketo Engage, Uber Eats can activate a new partner restaurant in five days, a process that used to take two weeks. By introducing a strategic approach to communications with partners, Uber Eats reduced the number of ad hoc emails generated by the account management and sales teams by 95 per cent. During the downtime over Christmas in Australia, they leveraged Marketo Engage to drive pre-booked consultations for account managers when they hit their desks in January. This led to 100% usage of inbound sales for the month.
“It’s been a trailblazing 18 months. We’ve performed foundational work that we really needed. Next, we’re going to develop a nuanced and personalised experience for each customer, using analytics to make better decisions for an even more considered approach to how we communicate at scale,” Connor concludes.
Key metrics included:
- Activation of new partner restaurants reduced from 2 weeks to 5 days
- 100% usage of inbound sales in January 2020
- 66% less time to onboard
- 95% reduction in ad hoc emails
“With Marketo Engage and BluprintX, we’ve moved from a shoestring operational approach for communications to one that’s much more robust and considered.”
Connor Sinclair, Uber Eats’ Senior Restaurant Experience Manager for Australia and New Zealand