Hi there,
Thanks very much for raising this - great to hear that your restaurant business is growing and very happy to discuss the points you raise in more detail. We will definitely be able to find the right solution for you.
I have some thoughts based on what you have written so far but there are quite a few things to cover so apologies for the long reply! And please do let me know your thoughts when you have a chance to read through.
Account Details
First of all, we believe we’ve found your Stuart account based on your username here and I have some recommendations based on that - but please send me a private message to confirm the account email address you have with us, or if there is more than one restaurant/account registered in our system.
Cars in London
Apologies for the confusion here. To clarify, yes because of the unique circumstances in London we don’t have many cars that you’d typically expect to be more willing to go these longer distances that we do in other cities. But we have a full motorbike fleet that is intended to cover these longer jobs. It’s true that we limit pedal bikes to shorter distances but we do have a sizeable fleet that will indeed be able to carry out these jobs successfully. For reference, our current distance limit is 12 miles for the motorbike case.
Unassigned Orders
Looking at some recent examples (on what we believe is your account), generally we get a driver assigned promptly - and this also seems to be the case for the longer distances (the 7-10 mile case). Where I see the delays in assigning, it is generally that you have requested a “large” package type - and these are the cases where the system is forced to look for a car.
So what I’d first like to confirm with you is under what circumstances you request a “small” vs “large” - for information, if you requested a “medium” then you would get motorbikes assigned correctly, but not for a “large”. But they of course might genuinely be orders too large for a motorbike - keen to hear your thoughts.
In the cases where they genuinely are large orders, we do have some other “cargobike”-like transport types ramping up in London to fulfil the shorter distance large order cases and I’ll check the status of this with the team to see what the operational capacity is looking like.
Unfortunately, for those cases where it’s both a large order and a long distance, it is simply a very difficult logistics problem to solve in London in the on-demand space - we would generally recommend splitting the order up so multiple motorbikes can fulfil the order in this case, but hopefully you won’t have many of those.
Order Delays
As I mentioned above, it looks like aside from the “large” order case that our success rate with you seems to be high - but from your perspective if that’s not the case, it would be great if you could privately send me any order numbers that have caused particular pain for you and we can investigate further.
You also mention that the delivery side of things is sometimes too slow and I just wanted to clarify if it’s just an assignment problem or whether you see the journey from the restaurant to the destination being too slow, whether you get any customer feedback about food being cold and so on. I’d be interested to get your thoughts on this as it is quite a rare case to see such long distances for restaurants, these distances tend to be in the retail or grocery space.
Orders up to 20 miles
Finally, I’d like to clarify your point about distances being up to 20 miles (since I mentioned the distance limit for motorbikes being 12 miles) - we couldn’t see any orders over this 12 mile limit, but if you have any order examples nearer 20 to share, it would be good to understand how many of these you get and whether we need to look at alternatives for this case.
Many thanks and apologies for the lengthy reply - but hopefully that’s given you some thorough feedback about the circumstances here and how we might go about solving them together.
James