Grab Tech Insider: How to build businesses with Grab

Nong, like many other everyday entrepreneurs, has big dreams to scale her business. But with a space that sits only 10 people at a time or with the limited capacity restaurants can take in during this pandemic, it’ll be quite difficult to grow one’s business, or even to save up enough to set up a second store. This is when Nong decided to bring her Nong’s Noodle House onto GrabFood to serve more customers beyond her dine-in space.

If you’re like Nong who needs a boost to start and grow your business, here are the first few steps to take with GrabFood:

1. Onboarding journey

Luckily as soon as you join Grab Merchant, 95% of applicants are onboarded within 3 days.

Here’s the process:

1. AI Photo Engine
   • Grab’s AI-based photo engine detects poor-quality photos (e.g. stretched, blurry, unrelated) and are flagged for review or instantly blocked. Merchants will also be alerted to upload a better photo. Our system can also de-stretch photos.
2. Employees profile
   • Business owners like Nong can assign user profiles for different level of access
     • Owner: Full access, including ability to view and manage other outlets and more.
     • Store manager: Partial access, including updating store information, buying ads and supplies and tracking sales history.
     • Cashier: Limited access to order and payment-related features.

One-stop learning resource with GrabAcademy

GrabAcademy offers structured training to help improve merchants’ service level quality, and help their business growth. This training program will be integrated into the GrabMerchant app soon, with additional enhancements that will roll out in phases:

• Content recommendation which can identify and recommend relevant training content based on our ruleengine which identifies merchants’ business performance and needs.
• Engaging video and text-based courses to mimic 1:1 training
• Progress tracker to help keep merchant-partners’ completion rates and for us to know what is working

Operations

Merchants can easily manage its customers with Store Status by switch among three modes depending on their ability to handle more incoming orders:

• Normal: Default mode.
• Busy: Ability to key in more prep time required and ETA is extended accordingly.
• Pause: Merchants cannot take in more order; users cannot place orders for a period of time.

Provided support

Merchants who need support can go through the HelpCenter within GrabMerchant, and choose to chat with aCE agent in-app. When Grab first launched the in-app chat feature, wen oticed that 25% of chat users become unresponsive after waiting 5 to 10 minutes for a support staff to be available. Grab is enhancing its Chat feature with a dynamic queue formula which will direct merchants to other support channels if the expected wait time is long.

Optimization

Grab offers Menu Insights to let Merchants know what sells and what don’t. With this, sales performance of each item can be easily viewed, as well as the top menu item combinations. Merchants can also up sell by creating combo pairings within minutes, based on in-app recommendation.

Self-serve Marketing tools to boost visibility and sales

In just a few clicks, and just a few dollars, merchants can create different combination of ads and promotions via Grab’s Ads tool.

1. Promotions tool for merchants to create discount or promo campaigns to encourage trial for specific menu items. Merchants can also choose to participate in Grab-led campaigns.
2. Banner Ads which offers high-visibility on the GrabFood homepage to promote an existing promotion. The app automatically pulls all existing promotion for the merchant to choose from, and generates a banner for preview as well as provides suggestions for target audience and campaign duration based on what it knows.
3. Search Ads enable merchants to appear at the top of the search ranking to target consumer with specific intent. Grab also provides recommended keywords for merchants to ensure relevance and scale.

GrabMerchant Portal – a back office solution

• 3 years later, Nong has successfully expanded her noodle house to 30 stores across Thailand. She now needs a single, consolidated view of the business performance across all her outlets.
• The GrabMerchant portal provides merchants with a single view of their business performance across outlets and Grab services.
• The portal enables back office staff to see in-depth insights:
  1. Make instant changes to menus across all outlets.
  2. Easy accounting, reconciliation and financial reporting – saving merchants ~30 hours/month
  3. Provides in-depth insights across multiple functions such as business, operations, menuperformance, marketing and customer insights.
• The portal comes with much more in-depth insights than what’s available in the GrabMerchant app:
  • Operational insights: individual outlet performance; peak hour distribution; driver wait time & orderratings; as well as any lost orders and reason why.
  • Customer insights: percentage of new, existing and returning customers; customer retention & purchase frequency; demographic; as well as rating and reviews.