India’s largest and highly valued online food ordering and delivery platform, Swiggy, based in Bangalore, India, has transformed itself into an on-demand delivery platform. Its core food delivery has expanded to other areas like local deliveries with swiggy genie ( like dunzo ), healthy food ordering with health hub, and alcohol delivery while also boosting its grocery delivery service.
The lockdown forced restaurants to shut down, which was Swiggy’s largest source of business. The initial lockdown days saw the number of restaurants on the platform to drop to about 30-35%. Once the country began to unlock, around 70% of Swiggy,s partners are back. Every month, 7000 new restaurants are adding to swiggy on the platform, which already had 1 lakh restaurant.
Mr. Srivat TS, Swiggy’s VP of marketing, said that It was almost a life or death situation. The brand began operating as an essential service and worked things out quickly with government partners, delivery partners, restaurant partners, etc. Many people turned to Swiggy to get food – particularly in the first few weeks of lockdown. The company worked on multiple fronts – auditing restaurants, safety protocols, no-contact deliveries, training delivery partners, providing hygiene gear.
He further added that it was more about carrying on a lot of the work done during the lockdown’s initial days. Business operations had started returning to normal but in a very COVID-centric way. The company saw the efforts translate into strong consumer sentiments. Consumers turn to brands that they trust in times of a crisis.Mr. Srivat said that many new customers had used the platform for the first time as it became a need and swiggy now has a 30-40% growth of average order value than the pre covid level.
Swiggy’s single, biggest, and major concern was to assure consumers about the hygiene and precaution over the last 8 months of lockdown. ‘Trusted by 1Cr+ Indian’ campaign has showcased that a crore Indians had already ordered on the platform during post lockdown day. Social influence is the real way of swiggy to build trust among consumers.
There was a shift from cities to small towns during the virus outbreak. This redistributed the costumers and resulted in the exceeding in the pre covid ordering. For the IPL seasons, the brand has launched cricket themes TVC, and order is in peak due to the festive season.
Swiggy is now actively operating in all 500 cities and is toward full recovery. It saw an increase of about 80-85% of its pre covid ordering value. now the major focus of the brand is on servicing instead of expanding to other cities
