Swiggy Puts Customers First and Revolutionizes Delivery

“Having that flexibility in building and being able to have our chat operate in real time was key to us—that’s why we chose PubNub.”

- Rahul Bennapalan, Software Development Engineer 4 at Swiggy

Meet Swiggy

Founded in 2014, Swiggy has risen over the last seven years to become the leading delivery service in India. They are truly an end-to-end solution: connecting customers, restaurants, and delivery partners all the way from order to delivery. 

Their platform allows people in over 500 cities to quickly and easily order their favorite dishes from nearly 150,000 restaurants. In recent years, they have even expanded to offer a broader range of pick up and delivery services, from laundry to groceries.

Swiggy owes their success to the fact that they design their application around their customers. “Our platform is built first and foremost by focusing on our customer’s needs, especially when it comes to our UX and feature set,” said Rahul Bennapalan, Software Development Engineer 4 at Swiggy. 

A significant component of Swiggy’s customer-first approach is their robust customer support infrastructure, which the team architects and manages with help from PubNub.

The flexibility to build customized chat  

Prior to PubNub, Swiggy handled customer support inquiries primarily through agents in a call center and secondarily through customer support chat in their platform. As a result, even simpler requests—like a customer needing to cancel an order—were usually resolved through a phone call. 

For customers, this often led to resolution times of up to five minutes. And for support agents, significant manual work and time was spent on minor inquiries. With their previous phone support system, simple requests would turn into multiple questions that would lead to agents needing to navigate through multiple dashboard screens and customers sometimes needing to wait for agents due to limited availability.

As Swiggy grew and regularly needed to handle up to 200,000 customer inquiries a day with a peak concurrency of 2,000 users, they turned their focus to adapting their support model to better scale. To accomplish this, they focused on building out their chatbot support. 

After evaluating different platforms and speaking with fellow market leaders, Swiggy decided to rely on PubNub to power the Pub/Sub messaging in their chatbot. “Having that flexibility in building and being able to have our chat operate in real time was key to us—that’s why we chose PubNub,” said Bennapalan. 

With PubNub, Swiggy got the best of both flexibility and reliability. They were able to customize the look and feel of their chatbot in house, while still having an underlying layer of backend support they don’t need to worry about.

Scale and automation to support mass growth 

Today, Swiggy uses PubNub to power their chatbot to automate the resolution of basic customer inquiries, like order cancellations or delivery statuses. 

Instead of the default customer support model being a call to a phone bank, customers are now directed to a support chatbot in Swiggy’s application. PubNub ensures that questions from customers and automated responses from the chatbot are pushed in real time to optimize resolution time. 

Since deploying this support chatbot built with PubNub, Swiggy has been able to automate up to 70% of all customer support tickets. Because of this, their time to resolution has also decreased dramatically, from an average of around five minutes pre-automation to just 30 to 40 seconds now. 

Both Swiggy and their customers have benefited from this new support model. The automation Swiggy has been able to achieve with PubNub means they need less agents to support every issue, which has helped improve their overall efficiency. Customer satisfaction has also improved, as end users can get timely answers to their questions and no longer need to spend minutes on the phone, waiting for a support agent to be assigned. 

This chatbot has also given Swiggy the confidence that they can easily scale their support infrastructure as they continue to grow, adding more businesses and customers to their innovative platform. Instead of needing to worry about the reliability of their support model, the Swiggy team can focus their efforts on innovating and iterating.

Building beyond their initial use case 

Because Swiggy is so customer-focused in their development, they’re always looking for ways to make their platform more beneficial to their end users. This is especially true when it comes to their support offering. 

Due to the success they’ve already been able to achieve with their chatbot, PubNub continues to play an important role in Swiggy’s product improvement roadmap for support. 

If you, like Swiggy, could benefit from a customizable, reliable, and scalable solution to build your in-app chat, reach out and talk to our team of experts.