How DoorDash reduced holiday season order delays by 80% with Avenue

99%

reduction in shutdown times per year

improvement in delivery of SLAs

As they expand into new verticals, DoorDash is using Avenue to plan for peak-volume periods and proactively maintain service quality.

About

DoorDash’s mission is to empower local economies by connecting customers to local merchants. After building their brand on restaurant deliveries, DoorDash is evolving into a company people can turn to for deliveries of all kinds.

“From a product ops perspective, Avenue is the tool of my dreams. I’m responsible for quality outcomes, and Avenue helps me create them.”

Taylor Tackett

Senior Manager, Platform Product Ops at DoorDash

Challenge

DoorDash sought to maintain high quality standards in a new vertical by handling issues proactively

DoorDash is known for delivering food from local restaurants to customers' doorsteps. Now, they’re expanding to deliveries from other local merchants, like retailers, grocery stores and pharmacies. To build credibility in a new space, DoorDash needed to prove they could deliver.

That’s why Taylor Tackett, Senior Manager of Platform Product Operations, wanted to address her biggest ops pain point — real-time issue identification. In the 2022 holiday season, mismatches between planned and incoming order volumes caught her team by surprise, resulting in deliveries being rolled over to the next day.

Motivated by those experiences, Taylor sought a proactive issue alerting system that would let her team quickly identify and act to resolve issues. She wanted to do it before the 2023 peak holiday season. Taylor needed a way to plan for expected order volumes, and be alerted when incoming volume surpassed them. That way, her team could adjust plans in the moment to maintain service quality.

For visibility into ops issues, Taylor had experimented with Mode, a BI tool used broadly at DoorDash, to generate daily reports from her data. But Mode’s daily reports didn’t signal edge cases strongly enough, nor did they provide an easy way to outline or record actions taken to address them. Instead of digging through multiple tables and waiting out lag times, she needed a system that would alert her of issues as they were happening, not after the fact.

“Proactive issue identification has become mission critical for our business as we start to develop credibility outside of the restaurant space.”

Solution

With Avenue’s Alerts, the product operations team gets real-time visibility and takes immediate action to prevent degradation

Luckily, DoorDash was already working with Avenue for menu quality assurance. After onboarding with Avenue, Taylor moved quickly, collaborating closely with the Avenue team to develop solutions and signals to scale operations, streamline contingency planning, and drive outsized impact.

Ahead of the 2023 holiday season, Taylor set up monitors in Avenue to alert when actual orders vastly differed from planned orders. Pulling from SQL, Taylor set up a monitor that alerted the team when volumes were significantly higher than planned.

Through peak periods, Avenue kept Taylor’s team ahead of unexpected order volume, enabling them to proactively adjust and make operational decisions, such as sending strategic driver communications, to maintain service quality — even in periods of unforeseen rush.

Taylor is also using Avenue to identify and develop signals for fraud and long-distance orders that risk on-time delivery. She’s set up alerts to flag these situations, which require intervention from her team to improve the customer’s experience.

Beyond Alerts, Taylor has leveraged Avenue’s quantitative metrics to uncover the root causes of issues and prevent them before they occur. For example, she’s using data from the long-distance Alerts to guide choices on which zip codes Dashers can reliably fulfill orders to.

“Avenue allows us to get ahead of issues, rather than figure them out hours later. As soon as we’re alerted to orders coming in over volume, we can take action and adjust our operations for the day to handle the demand.”

Results

DoorDash reduced Q4 order delays by several hours with proactive issue detection

With Avenue, Taylor’s team stays on top of fulfillment issues to proactively create better merchant and customer experiences. Avenue is helping DoorDash identify the root causes of issues and identify opportunities to improve:

Reduced shutdown hours by 99% year over year
Increased time to issue identification by several hours
Improved delivery SLAs by 3%

Moving forward, Taylor sees many exciting ways to leverage Avenue beyond product operations. She plans to advocate for onboarding more teams to Avenue, using it to broadly elevate DoorDash’s operations. She loves how Avenue shares that forward-thinking enthusiasm, tapping their customer conversations for ideas on how to improve DoorDash’s experience — and their platform as a whole.

Interested in Avenue for marketplaces? Here’s how CornerUp saves thousands by using Avenue for real-time fraud detection.