GO-JEK, Indonesia's billion dollar startup, surges ahead with Salesforce

GO-JEK is proof that even mighty things have small beginnings. The Indonesian start-up launched in 2010 as a concierge phone service with a single call centre in Jakarta that aimed to help residents beat the city’s notorious traffic jams.

Today, GO-JEK operates in 50 cities across Indonesia. Expanding substantially from its transport, courier and shopping service roots, it is now the number-one online service booking app in Indonesia.

GO-JEK is credited as Indonesia’s first billion-dollar startup, and has experienced particular success in the country’s food delivery sector via its popular GO-FOOD app.

“Before GO-FOOD, Indonesians could really only get food delivered from the big Western chains such as KFC and McDonalds,” says Nova Kurniawan, VP of ERP and Platforms Implementation at GO-JEK. “Now, GO-FOOD allows customers to order from approximately 150,000 merchants.”

This has created a vibrant local economy. GO-FOOD’s top five merchants are all independent local vendors, and the company now has more than 1 million registered drivers.

“GO-FOOD has expanded the market for local merchants,” confirms Kurniawan. “Through GO-FOOD, local merchants can reach a much broader audience, customers have more choice, and local drivers get more business.”

“Food delivery existed before GO-FOOD, but never at this scale,” adds Piotr Jakubowski, Chief Marketing Officer at GO-JEK. “We have seen local mom-and-pop vendors grow into successful businesses and launch full-scale restaurant kitchens. Some businesses are receiving 60 to 80 per cent of their orders from GO-FOOD, and some are setting up kitchens without physical resturant premises and they rely solely on GO-FOOD for their business.”

While that’s a worthy contribution to Indonesian society, managing such rapid growth has been a challenge for the evolving company.

Prior to implementing Salesforce, the GO-FOOD sales team onboarded merchants manually and managed their data via spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. As thousands of merchants rushed to register via the GO-FOOD website, this created a complicated workflow that required the sales team to manually replicate account data across a number of back-end systems.

“The sales team would manually complete and validate lead information coming in from our website,” explains Kurniawan. “New account information would then have to be replicated across our order management system and mobile app.”

In addition, the manual spreadsheets simply could not accommodate the enormous volume of data the GO-FOOD team was dealing with, says Kurniawan.

“We needed to create and manage 150,000 merchant records. There was no automatic update history – we didn’t know when a record had been updated or by whom. We were relying on our employees to manually record every step.” 

Kurniawan and the GO-FOOD Team turned to Sales Cloud for the solution to their problems.

“Sales Cloud was a simple way to improve this process,” he says. “Being cloud based, we didn’t need to invest in new infrastructure and hardware. It’s easy to implement and ready to use.”

Kurniawan explained that Sales Cloud provides the speed and agility his team requires to support the company’s exponential growth.

“In terms of the number of users, it’s easy to scale up as we grow, and we’re not concerned about memory capacity as we add more merchant accounts,” he says.

Despite being in the early days of its deployment, Kurniawan is already noticing the impact Salesforce is having on the business as his team works towards streamlining workflows.

“The problems we had using the spreadsheets are already being addressed,” he says. “We now have accurate, qualified information and users can only edit the information they are assigned to. There’s a checklist of steps to complete, so we are seeing workflow improvements as well.”

The company is also using Salesforce to onboard new partner merchants onto the GO-FOOD platform.

“Salesforce allows us to manage the onboarding process in a streamlined and structured way,” says Johan Surani, Senior Vice President of Merchants at GO-JEK “This has helped increase the speed at which we onboard merchants and reduced errors that we historically faced when manually onboarding merchants.”

Kurniawan also expects the data to reveal important market insights that will help to direct the company’s future growth strategy.

“The Salesforce platform allows us to see the density of our merchants in different areas so we can identify where the gaps are,” he says. “This will help us to direct business to growth areas by canvassing new merchants in certain service areas that are lacking. We can also use the data to ensure there is diversity within our food offerings in all our service areas.” 

While Kurniawan and his team are pleased with the results so far, they see more room for improvement as Sales Cloud is extended to GO-JEK’s other verticals, and all their back-end systems are integrated into a single platform.

“We really want to integrate Salesforce with our order and content management systems so we have one single view of our business,” says Kurniawan. “This will make processes faster and easier for our users.” 

Surani says Salesforce has also improved collaboration across departments and provides “end-to-end visibility so we know exactly what is happening with every single merchant at any point in time.

“This takes our onboarding experience for merchants to a whole new level. It makes our team much more collaborative, more efficient and strengthens our relationship with merchants because they feel the power of this new efficiency right from the start.”Going forward, GO-JEK also plans to use Marketing Cloud to inform its strategic decision-making and help its merchants better serve their customers.

“We want to use Marketing Cloud to better attract new merchants, engage with existing merchants and better understand the needs of newly onboarded merchants,” says Surani. “We hope to provide our merchants with data around seasonalities or trends that GO-JEK is seeing.”

Providing that level of local data to merchants will help GO-JEK deliver on its goal to localise innovation in order to provide solutions that are most relevant to its Indonesian customers and merchants, says Jakubowski.

“It comes down to how can we as an ecosystem help drive the digital economy in Indonesia. The on-demand space, which you could say was inspired by the scale and growth of GO-JEK, actually lowered the unemployment rate in Indonesia by half a percent in 2016. Our focus is really on how we can bring even more people into the digital economy.”  

In doing so, GO-JEK offers an important example of how technology can drive life-changing opportunities for every-day people that were previously unavailable – whether that’s providing a stable income or inspiring local entrepreneurs of all ages to start a business.

“GO-JEK’s partners now have stable incomes, which means they can achieve things that were previously unattainable like sending their kids to university,” said Jakubowski.

This speaks directly to Salesforce’s core value of equality and belief that business is the greatest platform for change. It’s a shared value that will continue to drive the partnership between the two companies well into the future.