Foodpanda is a German mobile food delivery marketplace headquartered in Berlin, Germany and currently operating in 10 countries and territories. The company has partnered with over 27,095 restaurants in 193 cities and works with over 15,733 delivery riders.
The country is in the news for all the bad reasons in India. Foodpanda processes and sends orders directly to partner restaurants, which then deliver to their customers. It is not sure whether the company is in bad shape, operations need revival or simply facing the heat of competition from other food delivery apps, people are definitely not happy with their delivery service and most importantly their customer service. The customers seem to be frustrated with their “Need assistance? we are a DM away” message.
The anger is not limited to messages with salutations to the customer support team of Food Panda. People have taken to social media in big numbers, even threatening the company to drag them to the Indian consumer court which is a designated body established to oversee consumers interests.
One of their customers posted on the Facebook page of Foodpanda that he ordered food for his mother, who is a diabetic, but after an hour or so, the order got cancelled, without anyone from the customer support to address the issue. This caused great hardship to him and his mother.
Another incident widely circulated on the social media, is when the delivery guy “forgot” to pickup the delivery and the restaurant kept waiting for him, ignoring the customer in the meanwhile. In a similar ludicrous incident reported by a customer on their social media page along with the order ID, the delivery guy after taking the order from the restaurant refused to deliver the order because he hadn’t received his salary from Foodpanda! In another bizarre incident, a delivery guy thrashed the customer over some argument in Pune. Later, an FIR was registered against the delivery guy.
Times of Startups also tried to ascertain the veracity of various claims. On the India Facebook page of the food delivery app, you will find comments flooded with grievances ranging from people seeking refund(with people attaching their auto generated ticket numbers ) to people waiting for customer support response, in many cases for more than a week. So, prima facie, it definitely seems that customers are not happy with the services offenred by Foodpanda. If the company has to survive in this growing competition with the entry of players like Uber along with the existing players like Zomato etc., the company will have to pull up the socks and that too pretty quickly.
