Quality First: Rewarding Shoppers & Providing the Best Customer Experience

Over the last six months, we’ve been listening to and meeting with shoppers around the country to understand what motivates them and how we can make their experience better. Shoppers have told us they take immense pride in what they do and strive to deliver with excellence — bringing their own secret sauce to work every day.

Shoppers recognize the important role they play in people’s lives, nourishing families and giving valuable time back to Instacart customers. Through our interactions with shoppers, we learned we could do a better job of celebrating their commitment to quality service and rewarding them for their efforts. That’s why we are introducing a new pilot that will recognize shoppers for their excellence and provide even better support to help all shoppers succeed in their roles.

Announcing a New Quality First Pilot

Customers rely on Instacart shoppers to pick their groceries as well or better than they would themselves. As such, we want to recognize shoppers who offer an excellent experience for customers, giving the highest quality shoppers more prioritization and opportunities to shop. Today, we’re announcing a pilot in two cities, Houston and Tampa, that rewards the highest quality shoppers with more access to hours.

We heard from shoppers that the current Early Access status favors shoppers who shop more, but not necessarily better. Launching this pilot will help us understand how we can reward the best shoppers, while also providing information that will help all shoppers improve over time. Starting on June 9, 2019, Early Access status will be offered to shoppers in Houston and Tampa based on the average customer star rating of their last 100 orders, instead of the time they’ve spent shopping.

How it Works

As ratings are submitted from customers, a shopper’s total average star rating will be displayed on the “How Am I Doing?” page in the Shopper app. Early Access status may vary by region. Hours, as always, will be available on a first come, first served basis. To support shoppers through this transition, we will look at ratings in a way to cover customer feedback that may be out of a shopper’s control.

This includes:

• Forgiving the lowest rating out of every 100 orders
• Removing ratings under 5 stars for specific factors such as extreme weather or app outages
• Separating ratings for in-store shoppers and full-service shoppers, so shoppers are rated independently by customers
• Excluding acceptance rate, speed, reliability incidents, and other metrics that should not impact an average star rating

Getting Better with Every Order

Whether shoppers are picking the perfect ingredients for a summer salad or communicating with customers about replacement options, we want to offer the right support and resources every step of the way. To set shoppers up for success, we’ll be offering new learning materials and in-person workshops over the next six weeks to provide information to help shoppers — regardless of rating — get better with every order. We recognize not every shopper will qualify for Early Access status, but we want to encourage those who strive to get there and we’ll be adding more resources in-app to help shoppers achieve that goal.

As we look toward the launch of this pilot, we’re excited to continue listening to shoppers and building a better experience. We are grateful for the Instacart shopper community and the impact you continually make on customers’ lives.

To learn more, check out the Shopper Help Center.

The Instacart Shopper Experience Team

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.