From Order to Door: How Delivery Hero enhanced customer experience with Twilio
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Delivery Hero operates in around 70 countries, across four continents, with 11 leading brands, including foodpanda, talabat, foodora, HungerStation, PedidosYa and more. Every day, millions of customers rely on Delivery Hero for everything from restaurant meals and groceries to pharmacy items, flowers, and specialty retail. The rider app alone supports a vast global community of active riders, helping fulfill more than 10 million orders daily.
The Challenge: Real-time, trusted delivery communications at global scale.
In the last mile, time matters. The critical handover—when a rider meets the customer—must be timely, clear, and reliable. But when customers were unreachable at the last mile, riders faced mounting friction: language barrier when attempting contact with customers, personal call costs from international or roaming charges, and time wasted waiting in agent queues when deliveries failed. Riders' privacy was also at risk when using personal phones for calls.
Delivery Hero needed to capture customer attention at exactly the right moment, ensure traceability of every contact attempt to meet terms and conditions, control escalating costs, and respect local regulations that limit what riders can be asked to do on personal devices.
"We need customers’ attention at the right moment. If the final handover fails, everyone loses. The customer doesn’t receive their order, and we’re left holding goods that can’t be used elsewhere."
The Solution: The right message at the right time
Putting riders and customers first, Philip's team focused on the pick-up and drop-off stages, making handovers efficient, effortless, and reliable for riders and customers alike, by leveraging Twilio's global phone number pooling paired with Programmable Voice API and Text-to-Speech functionality.
Now, when a rider taps a button in the app, customers receive an automated call from a local phone number in their preferred language. Riders also no longer need to expose their personal phone numbers. This approach protects rider privacy, eliminates personal call costs, and builds customer trust—making handovers seamless for everyone involved.
"At Delivery Hero, connecting riders, vendors, and customers is what drives our business, and Twilio helps us make that connection seamless."
Building with Twilio: Interactive Voice Response (IVR) that connects at the doorstep
Delivery Hero replaced the friction for their riders with an automated Twilio IVR workflow triggered directly from the rider app. With one tap, the app initiates a Twilio-powered outbound call to the customer in the customer’s selected app language.
The IVR presents clear options to the customers and if a cancellation is confirmed or customers remain unavailable, the order is cancelled without contacting an agent. This saves time and removes a layer of manual work for the delivery rider.
Built in Twilio Studio and integrated with our existing systems, Delivery Hero scaled from first code to thousands of daily calls in under three months. By leveraging Twilio Programmable Voice, these critical moments are transformed into actionable data and insights.
"With Twilio’s global coverage, local numbers, and regulatory support, we built once and launched across multiple markets, while keeping the customer experience consistent in dozens of languages."
Seamless integration, reduced friction for riders and agents
By making it easier to reach customers at the doorstep, Delivery Hero is now able to reduce friction for riders and support teams alike:
25% reduction in driver-to-agent contact rates
60%+ fewer rider-to-agent escalations in “customer unavailable” scenarios
IVR performance, in Spain alone: 65% answered, 32% busy or no answer, 3% failed — improving reachability by surfacing invalid numbers and informing future OTP revalidation
These results show how Delivery Hero transforms their delivery process into a scalable, measurable, market-ready workflow. Cutting support tickets, reducing operating costs, and delivering a more reliable customer experience without slowing deliveries. Riders get a solution built for real-world conditions: no international calling fees, less language pressure, and no time wasted in call queues.
Meanwhile, Delivery Hero keeps centralized control, enabling them to roll out the same proven voice experience across almost 70 countries while adapting to local regulations and cost structures as they scale.
Why Twilio? From provider to platform partner
Delivery Hero leverages Twilio’s robust communications platform to build trust, enhance operations and customer experience across its brands and use cases:
To build trust with their users, Delivery Hero verifies the identities of consumers, riders, and vendors with the Twilio Verify API, using built-in fraud protection and OTP delivery via SMS, WhatsApp, and email. Twilio powers Delivery Hero’s rider recruitment and operational notifications, delivering 7M+ SMS and 1M+ WhatsApp messages monthly to customers, riders, and vendors.
In addition to using Twilio IVR calls to improve transparency during pick-up and drop-offs. Delivery Hero enables call masking between riders and customers. This protects user privacy and builds trust on the platform.
Leveraging Twilio Email with over 140M emails per month, for marketing and transactional communication, Delivery Hero gets high deliverability. Twilio Professional Services provides ongoing deliverability support to strengthen sender reputation and inbox placement.
With the flexibility of Twilio’s platform, Delivery Hero is able to reach everyone on their preferred channel and keep the communication seamless and effective.
"At Deliver Hero, Twilio has a very strong reputation for quality and support. We tested it in Studio, got answers fast, and launched with full confidence."
What’s next: More channels, more trusted, AI virtual agents
Together, Delivery Hero and Twilio can create trusted, simple and smart solutions that are reliable, compliant and provide communications at scale for customers, riders and vendors globally. Turning every interaction into a seamless, secure customer experience.
