SkipTheDishes helps more restaurants thrive with Salesforce

The restaurant industry has been immensely impacted by COVID-19, with more than 30% of restaurants across Canada closing their doors. SkipTheDishes is committed to helping restaurants stay open and provide a source of income while dining rooms are required to close – take-away food that’s delivered direct to customers. The company connects more than 40,000 restaurants with millions of hungry customers throughout Canada, and is onboarding more every day.

While COVID-19 has accelerated the company’s growth, SkipTheDishes has been quick to share its success. Throughout the pandemic, the company has given more than CAN$71 million in commission rebates and market-driving initiatives to restaurant partners, added a tipping feature to its platform that has resulted in an additional $1.6 million of revenue for eateries, and donated over $1.3 million to Food Banks Canada.

“With Salesforce, we were able to scale up quickly during the pandemic and onboard thousands of new restaurants while maintaining great service levels to existing partners,” said Steve Puchala, Senior Vice President of Growth & Restaurant Success at SkipTheDishes. “Salesforce has been key to achieving our goal of providing the best possible experience for restaurants so they can succeed and grow on our platform.”

SkipTheDishes offers consumers food delivery within just 30 minutes of placing an order. Its Restaurant Success team is responsible for finding, onboarding, and looking after restaurant partners so customers can pick from the greatest possible selection. “Our ambition is to become the most valued partner for restaurants, and that means leveraging technology to provide each member of the team with a 360-degree view of every eatery,” explained Puchala.

The company originally rolled out Salesforce in 2016 simply to manage leads. But in 2018, trailblazing Salesforce developer Lindsay Johnson joined the team and is helping transform the business with automated workflows, smarter integrations, and real-time analytics.

SkipTheDishes now uses Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Tableau CRM to bridge the gaps across the organization. “As our central system, Salesforce brings all our teams together so we’re no longer working in silos,” commented Johnson, Salesforce and Technical Lead at SkipTheDishes. “This has been particularly important over the last year with us all working from home, and has helped enhance internal relationships as well as those with our partners.”

With every customer interaction in Sales Cloud, anyone can pick up the conversation, which is particularly important given the company’s current growth rate. “We’re expanding so fast at the moment that there’s lots of internal promotions. But this movement isn’t impacting partner relationships, thanks to Salesforce,” explained Jamie Gowryluk, Director of Growth & Sales Enablement at SkipTheDishes.

The solution helps sales teams manage a higher volume of leads more effectively with better information and automated workflows. For example, the solution flags potential partners that are in lockdown zones and therefore eligible for the company’s 30-days free promotion and rebates.

SkipTheDishes is also improving transparency across the business with Salesforce dashboards. “We’re able to track our metrics on an individual basis, by location, and by other specific parameters,” added Gowryluk. “The dashboards are shared with finance and leadership teams as well as sales for real-time business insights.”

Once a partner has signed to join the platform, the onboarding team is automatically notified to speed up processes. Thanks to Salesforce and an AppExchange solution for document signing, it’s now 50% faster to onboard new restaurants. The team plans to further enhance onboarding with self-service capabilities and Lightning Scheduler so restaurants can book their own appointments.

Service speed and quality have also increased with Salesforce, with SkipTheDishes now consistently reaching out to partners and resolving their issues in less than 24 hours. “We’ve recently completed a very cool integration, via which all interactions in the SkipTheDishes online portal are automatically recorded in Service Cloud. Queries are then routed to the correct department depending on the partner,” explained Johnson. “Capturing everything in Salesforce is very powerful for the business and helps us continuously improve the partner experience.”

In fact, this one integration helps SkipTheDishes provide better support for partners and faster. It’s given people hours back in their work week. But for SkipTheDishes, it’s not just about efficiency. “We want to give our partners the option to connect with us however they wish – whether that’s via the portal, by email, phone, or text,” commented Gowryluk. “We’re currently looking at Marketing Cloud to enhance our omnichannel capabilities.”

With all its restaurant data in Salesforce, SkipTheDishes is using Tableau CRM to turn it into insights that reveal how the business and its partners are doing. For example, SkipTheDishes is easily able to identify restaurants that are starting to experience a shift in customer ordering behaviour. It’s now planning to use Tableau CRM's predictive analytics to identify in advance which restaurants are likely to experience this, so the team can step in and work with them to make improvements.

“With Salesforce, we can stay one step ahead while being truly effective in our day-to-day operations,” concluded Puchala. “The team at Salesforce cares about our success in the same way that we care about our restaurants. By helping each other, we can all achieve more.”