Dive Brief:
- Convenience stores still trail restaurants in third-party delivery satisfaction among consumers, according to a recent study from Intouch Insight.
- Consumers rated convenience stores lower than restaurants on metrics like order accuracy, food temperature and overall satisfaction when placing orders through all three major third-party delivery options — DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub.
- C-stores earned the highest delivery satisfaction scores during the dinner daypart, at 87%. The second highest was for breakfast, at 85%.
Dive Insight:
As c-stores continue learning from and catching up to restaurants with their foodservice offerings, Intouch Insight’s latest report underscores that the industry has some areas where it needs to improve.
Clarity of listings could be one easy place for c-stores to catch up, the report noted.
“For convenience stores, the lack of clarity on whether meal items were pre-packaged or made-to-order severely impacted customer satisfaction,” the report stated.
Customers more satisfied with restaurant delivery orders
When it came to accuracy, 90% of orders placed to restaurants were filled correctly while the same applied to only 77% of c-store orders. Made-to-order items accounted for more than half of incorrect items at convenience stores.
C-stores are also impacted by their inability to customize orders, the report shows. More than 90% of consumers said the restaurants they ordered from let them customize, while only 45% of those who ordered from c-stores said the same.
While c-stores edged out restaurants by about 43 seconds in delivery time, the report found that customers were still less satisfied with the delivery speed from convenience stores than restaurants.
“From these findings, we can hypothesize that consumers may have higher expectations for speed when it comes to convenience stores,” the report noted.
The study incorporated mystery shopper input across 300 restaurants and 300 convenience stores. It was conducted in partnership with Informa Connect Limited, an events, training and specialist digital content company owned by C-Store Dive parent company Informa.
