As humans become busier each day, delivery services have become a part and parcel of our lives. Online delivery service providers nowadays deliver almost everything, which significantly reduces our workload. However, due to a variety of reasons, we see deliveries being postponed, lost or delayed quite often. Apart from delays, firms, restaurants and businesses using delivery partners also have to shell out a hefty sum to avail their services.
The above problems have troubled many, causing several businesses to completely do away with their delivery systems. Fortunately, solutions like DelivApp have come to the rescue of such firms, helping them delivery with great ease and precision while being pocket-friendly.
The application is created for managing deliveries within an hour and allows users to manage their business remotely with the help of local delivery partners. The innovative concept and the assistance provided by DelivApp has therefore been appreciated by many.
We are fortunate to have interviewed Mr. Michael Parshin, the co-founder and CTO of the company, and learn about his mission, vision and road to success.
In Conversation with Mr. Michael Parshin, Co-Founder and CTO of DelivApp
Here’s an excerpt from the interview.
A warm welcome from SoftwareSuggest, Michael. In one sentence, what is DelivApp?
DelivApp is a software for managing deliveries in under an hour. If, say, a restaurant wants to deliver an order to their customer, they can turn to a third-party delivery platform like Uber Eats, but that is usually expensive. So, what else they can do is to deliver it by themselves or with the help of a more affordable local delivery partner. Our product is good for these two scenarios.
Who are the main customers of your software?
We cater to two types of customers. The first one is a restaurant that has its own 5-6 delivery people. Usually, they would need a system to manage their off-premises business better, doing 200-400 daily deliveries. Another one is a delivery services company that works with tens and sometimes hundreds of restaurants. This company needs to manage 100-1000 couriers doing 2,000-10,000 orders per day.
What is your offer to them that and how is it different from the offers of others?
Our product offers visibility and automation that results in increased staff productivity and massive savings. It is especially critical today we see severe labor shortages everywhere around the world. Our system also allows for a profitable growth.
For example, when not using delivery management software at all (or when using a manual system), one dispatcher can usually handle 150-200 orders daily. With our system in place, this number increases by a factor of 3 and even more. Our system knows how to bundle the orders practically on the fly, and this allows our customers leverage their courier time most efficiently.
Most of the systems we know were created to support last-mile deliveries for e-commerce, meaning they were created for planning days or hours ahead. This requires a different brain from when you have to plan for the next hour only. DelivApp was purpose-built for managing on-demand deliveries. From its inception more than 5 years ago, every single feature that we shipped helps to better handle on-demand.
Being in the market for more than 5 years, what are the most important characteristics of the delivery management technology?
With millions of orders under our belt, I can say with confidence that key tech requirements go down to these three things: reliability, scalability, and affordability. Most of the deliveries we power are food deliveries. Our customers deal with people who ordered lunch or dinner, and should anything happen, these people go from being hungry to being angry in no time.
As a technology provider, we cannot afford any glitches to cause delivery delays, and we invest heavily into being reliable. As for scalability – on-demand delivery is a dynamic business. You can have 500 orders now, and in the next 30 minutes, you suddenly have 5,000 orders, then 10,000, and then you do down to 500. The system needs to manage these fluctuations well.
Obviously, it also needs to allow our customers to grow as they develop their business. The last parameter is affordability. You can create a very reliable and very scalable system, but it’s not enough in our business. It also must be affordable. Our customers live on razor-thin margins, so we need to make sure the software costs leave them room to breathe.
Apart from being affordable, is there any other way you could help restaurants save on delivery costs?
We’ve just released a new functionality called bidding, which comes on the heels of our partnership with a very large restaurant operator. Essentially what it does, it allows a restaurant to automatically offer orders to different delivery companies and receive bids from them – they bid on delivery time and on delivery price.
Using our system, delivery service providers can automatically place their bids and then win or lose the order, all in a matter of seconds. This allows restaurants to access a variety of offers and select the ones that are best for them at any given moment.
A lot of customers that review your software are raving about your customer support. What do you do to deserve such feedback?
We learn from the new customers that customer support is a huge issue in our industry. Developing software is easy, said no one ever, and from the recent Facebook outage event, we know that technology can fail regardless of the level of engineering talent, financial resource, and quality of the system.
For those cases (and even for simpler ones) support has to be there all the time. So, we make an effort to be instantly available during operational hours for our customers. We are also particularly empathetic with our clients because we started building the system practically in a restaurant kitchen, when our CEO Yan Zagatsky had a restaurant. So naturally, we know, even feel food delivery very well.
We also know that our system is not just another software that incrementally helps a business, it is a mission-critical software that defines whether people love you or hate you. We make sure our customers are loved.
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