Lalamove engages with users through seamless customer experience
Time to read: 2 minutes
Imagine running a tech company that connects users with delivery drivers through mobile and web apps, how would you scale your business and seek growth opportunities in markets outside your hometown?
That is exactly what Lalamove, the Hong Kong-founded on-demand delivery platform, has done since 2013. But with this expansion came another challenge. How can Lalamove facilitate communication among their users, driver partners, and customer service across markets?
Initially, the Lalamove team worked with local providers in each region to connect their driver partners and users. As they started to grow exponentially, they realized they needed a better solution to scale while providing a more reliable and secure connection.
“On average, we send 3 million SMS and 70 million emails monthly. Twilio provides a reliable communication service that requires one-off integration and enables us to communicate with our users and drivers globally. This allows us to make changes and deploy them to the market quickly. Twilio’s tech support is also responsive to our needs, making our integration more efficient and pleasant.”
Seeking solutions first: Valuing Twilio as a customer engagement expert
To address their growth, Lalamove trusted Twilio to provide a stronger solution and wider coverage than local vendors. They saw Twilio as a valuable partner to help shape their communication strategy.
“Twilio are experts in communication. We rely on Twilio when seeking solutions to our customer engagement problems. We are always seeking solutions first, products second,” said Homing Tam, Product Manager at Lalamove.
As part of their user registration process, Lalamove requires email and phone verification. Thus, they use Twilio's Programmable Messaging for WhatsApp and SMS to deliver users' OTPs.
Some driver partners prefer other channels to receive messages like OTPs, causing them to drop out of the onboarding process. For this, Lalamove utilised Twilio’s Robocalling and Programmable Voice to read the OTP.
Raising brand awareness: Sending 70 million monthly emails
Many users need delivery services to send gifts to their loved ones during the holidays. To ensure that recipients receive their presents on time, Lalamove acts as a matchmaker to secure supply to fulfill demand during the peak season.
But what about normal days when the demand for delivery services is low?
Using Twilio’s SendGrid Email API and Email Marketing Campaigns, Lalamove sends targeted emails to inactive and new customers to increase demand to match driver supply.
On average, Lalamove sends 70 million monthly emails to raise brand awareness and promote their service.
Prioritizing privacy: Implementing phone number masking
When a user places a delivery order, the conversation between the driver partner and them happens via in-app chat or phone call.
Lalamove protects various parties involved in the delivery service by using the phone number masking feature included in Twilio’s APIs, aiming to protect stakeholders’ identities and keep communications in Lalamove’s system.
“Privacy is also an important part of our customer engagement. We took the initiative to use phone number masking, so users and drivers can still call each other without exchanging their phone numbers.”
Facilitating the next evolution of customer experience
Lalamove is currently operating in more than 40 cities in Asia and Latin America, with the focus of exploring new coverage networks. To make this happen, they focus on improving their services rather than outperforming competitors.
According to Tam, their goal is to enhance their offerings, such as next-day delivery, to facilitate the next evolution of their customer experience.
“Customer expectations of service quality and engagement will only get higher. We want our customers to feel heard and connected. Our vision at Lalamove is to make this brand synonymous with delivery. When customers want to move something, we want them to say, ‘Let’s Lalamove it.’ Twilio is a great partner in helping us achieve that,” said Tam.
