Glovo is an on-demand delivery app designed to enable its users to order meals, groceries, and other items from restaurants and other vendors in their immediate area.

The Glovo app connects its 3.8 million customers and 58,000 couriers with its 89,000 partners in 25 countries and more than 800 cities. It has enabled the successful delivery of more than 245 million orders since it launched in 2015 in Barcelona.

Challenge

Glovo’s task boils down to finding the answer to a seemingly simple hypothetical question: How can Glovo facilitate fast, reliable deliveries from a wide range of merchants and service providers?

The question applies to big grocery store chains and small operations, such as a Kibanda - a small food hut that typically serves a neighborhood or community. If Glovo can furnish efficient delivery for tiny operations in remote corners of the world, imagine what it can do for bigger merchants in a thriving, populous metropolis.

In addition to structural and technology challenges (listed below), Glovo faced two major business challenges: a) Partner onboarding speed was too slow to keep up with Glovo’s needs and; b) Onboarding costs were more than Glovo wanted them to be.

Solution

Glovo chose to use Bird’s Flow Builder service integrated with WhatsApp Business to automate its tasks (big or small), communicate experiences on all channels, and reduce the complexity of data gathered from exchanges.

Using Flow Builder, Glovo initiates automated conversations via WhatsApp, bypassing the need for email and other slower digital communication methods that make it more difficult to scale. With contact established through engaging conversations, a complete partner journey unfolds through a combination of automated, live, and asynchronous communications.

Glovo is able to automate onboarding tasks, support tickets, and other workflows to help increase partner onboarding efficiency and reduce costs.

How it looks

Why they chose Bird

Prior to its partnership with Bird and WhatsApp, Glovo used several smaller communications vendors to handle onboarding and other communication needs. It was difficult to integrate them all. Glovo selected Bird as its WhatsApp Business Solution Provider to replace the smaller providers because Bird provided:

Flexible engagement capabilities -Flow Builder allowed Glovo to easily build the right engagement flow to pull partners into their onboarding process.

Operational efficiency –Working with Bird meant fewer internal resources for the setup, management and scale of a digital communication platform

Clean, useful data output– Flow Builder’s output includes actionable data that can help improve user experience and provide keen business insights.

Results

Glovo is currently scaling the rollout of its WhatsApp and Bird solutions to more countries. During the initial test phase to make their partner onboarding more efficient, Glovo was able to:

• 4x faster partner onboarding for some countries.

• +300% efficiency increase in partner onboarding capacity.

• A 30% to 80% reduction in onboarding costs - varied by country.

Glovo found that using WhatsApp with Bird’s guidance and support allowed it to move into new markets faster and provide more reliable, more efficient service to its growing international clientele.

“With Flow Builder we are able to adapt and run the same process through very heterogeneous markets: from Croatia to Uganda or Kazakhstan.”

Luis Grau Granada, Global Head of Courier Operations