Swiggy streamlined its operations with Exotel – here’s how

Swiggy’s success depends heavily on one thing – communication between all the relevant stakeholders. In an operation heavy business, the trick is to strike the right balance between maintaining productivity while keeping the cost low.Here’s where Exotel comes in. As a cloud telephony platform, we offer them help them increase their productivity by taking care of the backend (scale, maintenance, up-times). The cost also remains in check because our APIs offer them the flexibility to solve their most pressing communication problems.

We play a part every step of the way in the order process.

What the customer experiences

A customer logs into the Swiggy app, picks a restaurant, places an order and waits for the order to get delivered. But there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes to ensure that the entire process works smoothly.

Notifying the restaurant about the order

When an order is placed, restaurants sometimes don’t realise that they have a new order waiting. To avoid any delays, Swiggy’s team reminds restaurant about new orders as they come in. But manually calling and confirming every order with the restaurant is not a scalable solution.

Automated calls helped save on manual work. When an order is placed, the restaurant gets an automated call with the order notification. This automated call helps reduce delivery delays.

Delivery process – Safeguarding customer privacy (number masking)

The delivery person calls the customer in a few instances – problems with finding the address, to inform the customer once they reach the location or if there are any unexpected delayed. While all of the above are legitimate circumstances, this also means sharing the customer’s phone number with the delivery agent. Number masking allows the agent to reach the customer over a call in case they need to without having access to their phone number.

How this works

The delivery person clicks on the call button in the Swiggy app. Based on the order number, the call is connected to the right customer by Exotel’s system. Simple as that!

Verify Cash on Delivery Orders

Cash on delivery orders are always tricky. Sometimes, the orders are refused after a delivery agent shows up with the food. To avoid misuse on COD orders, Swiggy uses Exotel’s automated IVR calls to reconfirm the order with the customer.

When a COD order comes in, Swiggy places an automated IVR call via Exotel. Based on the IVR prompt, the customer is required to confirm the order by pressing the relevant key on his dial-pad.

This additional confirmation step helps weed out bogus orders.

Tech solution to hiring problems

Technology may not always seem like the first choice to solve problems in areas like hiring and marketing. But, at Exotel, we have seen how simple tech solutions can solve seemingly large problems with ease. And here are a couple of examples.

Hiring delivery personnel is a task that is not easy. It also is an on-going activity for the Swiggy team. The demand for delivery personnel is always high. So, once they procure a list of potential candidates, an automated call with a few relevant questions is a simple way to assess interest levels before going forward.

Making sense of all the data