[sshumaker]

Between my wife and myself, I've ordered from Postmates over a hundred times. But we barely use the service anymore because it has gotten so unreliable.

Even aside from the frequent "No Postmates are available", a large number of orders have issues, from excessive delays to missing items to even orders that don't show up. And while they eventually get taken care of by customer support, after waiting for two hours for dinner only to find out it's not coming, getting a refund is small consolation.

(I almost feel like sometime last year they switched to a model where the delivery person places the order instead of a call center. If that's true, it would help explain the drop in timeliness).

So while the app UX is decent the overall user experience leaves a lot to be desired.

I realize it's a different model, but we have way better luck with caviar.

[bastian]

I 100% agree. We faced some pretty crazy challenges in scaling our support team. Placing orders from over 50K merchants (per month) is not a simple task BUT i'm not trying to find excuses here. We're doing the right things and they will hopefully move the needle. If you order from our Plus merchants, the order is placed electronically and this reduces the error rate drastically. Email me at: [e-mail] and i will mark your account with a free subscription so you can try it out.

[pbarnes_1]

I say this having ordered probably 1000+ times through Postmates: It's not about the merchant. It's about the delivery.

Your dispatch system needs an overhaul. It has improved again lately but there was a period of several months when not a single Postmates delivery went right for me, and I'm in SOMA, and only order from restaurants around here.

I used to be 100% Postmates, spending maybe $2k/m but now I'm this:

  IF HOT FOOD REQUIRED:
    IS AVAILABLE ON UBER EATS:
      UBER EATS
    ELSE
      POSTMATES
  ELSE
    DOORDASH

UberEats is unfortunately a much better experience than Postmates now. :/

[bastian]

I can guarantee you that we will be relentless in improving dispatch, ordering and customer service. Recent changes dropped our average delivery times. In April we will switch to an auto-accept mode for all deliveries and we will also aggressively target faster pick-up times. Sorry we've let you down pbarnes.

[pbarnes_1]

Eh, dispatch is hard, especially for what I guess is 95%+ food orders where the difference between happy and unhappy is 10-15 minutes.

I used to work for a large courier company writing dispatch algos so... pet peeve. :)

[ChrisDutrow]

Perhaps this is obvious, but after you feel like you've recovered and are again providing good service. You might consider finding all the customers who you might have provided bad service too and send them a nice coupon with an explanation of how/why things were wrong and why/how they have been made good again.

A lot of times your worst critics can become your biggest fans this way.