Glovo Case Study

Glovo

Glovo is a Spanish quick-commerce start-up founded in Barcelona in 2015. It is an on-demand courier service that purchases, picks up, and delivers products ordered through its mobile app. Users can get virtually anything they want delivered in their cities, with food and grocery delivery being the most popular. To date, the app has over 50M+ total installs.

Business Challenge

In the early days of Glovo, simple contact was a significant issue for their app. There was no message communication available between users and couriers, and basic chat was only available to contact support agents. According to Ruchit Solanki, Glovo Director of Product Management, “we were so focused on ensuring that our basic chat was functioning soundly that we were detracted from developing core user value in the app itself. We were not spending nearly as much time innovating and delivering user value that actually makes a difference.” These factors would ultimately affect customer retention, and as such, the Glovo team needed a new solution to allow them to reshift their priorities.

Why Glovo Chose Sendbird

In searching for a third-party chat solution, the Glovo team sought a vendor that they were confident could cover their ever growing use-cases, as the company wanted to unblock and enable different communication channels such as customer to courier, partner to customer, and partner to courier chat.

Furthermore, Glovo’s goal was to move towards the concept of a super-app, providing services beyond simply food delivery, such as retail, SaaS offerings, and more diverse partner services. “Three to five years out, what is the end-user experience that we are trying to create? Thinking not only in broadening services but broadening markets as well,” elaborates Solanki. With the large number of countries that Glovo services worldwide, the variability of markets was extensive. When dealing with even only the food-delivery use-case for these countries, looking at the footprint of Glovo, its market is not homogenous. Many of the smaller countries have diverse needs, so Glovo needed a solution that was nimble enough and could provide the proper coverage. As such, being able to address these future scenarios and use cases was a very significant consideration factor for the company.

Throughout Glovo’s rigorous evaluation phase, Sendbird regularly would come into conversation, primarily due to its reputation in the global chat space. Solanki recounts, “Sendbird was a familiar name for many of us with a background in the industry, with experience working on the support side of things, or even from working with Sendbird at prior companies.”

Working immediately using Sendbird’s documentation and support, Glovo conducted multiple POCs, emphasizing ease of integration. The team wanted to see how easy it would be to leverage Sendbird’s resources and be able to build on top of it. In these regards, Sendbird truly differentiated itself from the competition. Combined with Sendbird’s well-known work with some of the most prominent brand names in the world, Glovo had confidence in its ability to cover both its current and future roadmaps with Sendbird.

Results

Sendbird was fully implemented for customer-courier chat within four months, much faster than Glovo expected and certainly compared to building chat in-house. According to Michele Spina, Glovo Product Manager, “due to our very tight deadlines, we had to work fast to complete the migration. In the end, we did it on time, and Sendbird was very helpful because they answered all our technical questions, whether by call or email. So Sendbird support was super helpful along this integration journey.” Sendbird’s performance reliability directly contributed to increased positive technical and business impact as well. Spina states that “because Sendbird is reliable and stable, we measured disability by looking at the percentage of delivered messages. Previously, we were delivering less than 80% of messages. With Sendbird we deliver more than 95%.”

With this enhanced performance, chat usage increased by 3%, conversations without reply decreased by 15%, and contact rates decreased by 3%, meaning improved customer-to-courier communication versus customer-to-support agent contact. While Glovo is currently using Sendbird for its table stakes chat features such as 1:1 chat and file and image sharing, the company’s roadmap includes “new value-added features to enhance the end-user experience, such as location sharing, voice messages, and reply bots,” says Spina.

On the engineering side, Sendbird reduced the management of multiple providers that Glovo previously used to handle its complex technical challenges. “With Sendbird coming into the picture, we were able to optimize on reliability, maintenance, and overall engineering time,” says Solanki, “and ultimately enabled us to fully globally launch the current capabilities for Glovo, which did not exist before us going down that path.” Furthermore, chat has been game-changing for many of Glovo’s end users worldwide, particularly in smaller countries where phone calls can be costly. By providing customers and couriers the ability to communicate without having to call each other, they no longer have to bear the original expense of making that call, translating to increased satisfaction by Glovo country managers and end-users.

Solanki concludes, “Sendbird allows us to fully concentrate on our value prop, wherein the global ecosystem ensures that our end-user gets what they want in the least amount of time. Chat is an enabler to that value prop, and Sendbird gave us the ability to concentrate on our strengths and align to our long-term strategy of where we want to invest our resources.”

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWSnative services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 250 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.