Why DoorDash Cannot Deliver Your Order Properly
Posted on in thoughts • 559 words • 3 minute read
So I have requested a food delivery from DoorDash, and it happened that my food still hadn’t been picked up yet. I opened my DoorDash app at 12:30 pm today, and it’s still being prepared until now at 7:50 pm. During the approximately 8 hours wait, I have tried to reach out to them three times, and each agent responded to me with a predefined message: “We are sorry for the delay … We will assign a new dasher for you … We will refund you the money amount XXX”, etc. Out of curiosity, I did some googling about how these custom-faced companies deal with this type of situation, and here is what I found:
- Show your attitude that you are truly sorry.
- Validate your customer’s feeling.
- Explain what happened.
I copied these bullet points from HelpScout, which is a SaaS company that has powered a lot of tech companies such as GrubHub, PostMark, etc.
In the past, for example, for some smartphone companies (well, Apple had indeed done a great job) – it’s very hard to get an apology from them because their phone has somehow defected, or it generally took a long process to get your device replaced.
So why people change to be more “friendly”? I guess it’s simply because these companies now care more about their reputations than in the past. Imagine the era without Facebook and Twitter, people from the U.S. don’t care about what had happened in China, and they never heard about Xinjiang internment camps. However, when you first talk about Xinjiang in the U.S. today, you probably will encounter the conversation on Twitter about the camps. Isn’t it an issue back in 2000? Maybe, but people don’t have a chance to talk about it, so why would China defend itself on that?
BREAKING: BBC has been banned in China. The report said the BBC was responsible for a 'slew of falsified reporting' on issues including Xinjiang and China's handling of coronavirus. It went on to say that 'fake news' is not tolerated in China
— Yalda Hakim (@BBCYaldaHakim) February 11, 2021
this is the first tweet I encountered after I searched “Xinjiang” on Twitter
Company is like another type of “country” that needs to preserve its public face – for various reasons. If public image is damaged, your stock will likely go down, your competitors might fight against you harshly, on and on… I am very happy to see what had changed here, but it also has drawbacks. Some big tech firms have a very good public image, and as a result, they become very wealthy. To become popular so that they can attract more customers, these companies decide to invest more money on maintaining their public images, then you know how the money circulated. Does it provide a lifeline for those smaller companies who used to be a specialist in certain areas? Or will it just promote another United States v. Microsoft to live? It certainly didn’t block the whole aisle, but it definitely narrows the bridge ahead.
Now back to my food delivery from DoorDash. They had just issued me a full-price refund plus a small amount of credit for a future order, and I was told to hold and keep waiting. What can I do now? I guess I have to follow what they told me to do.