Delivery Performance Deep Dive: What’s Driving Customer Dissatisfaction?

This project analyzes delivery order data from Cincinnati over a 30-day period, spanning September 16 to October 14, 2022. The dataset contains 60,583 entries across 19 columns, covering order details, delivery timestamps, driver assignments, and grocery partner performance.

🚨 Executive Summary

Our service is facing two critical challenges:

• Late Deliveries (4.7%) — driven by extreme delays in driver acceptance, especially for low-priced orders
• Order Accuracy (2.5%) — compromised by grocery store partners, leading to unresolved complaints

Recommended Actions:

1. Restructure Driver Incentives — make low-priced orders more attractive
2. Partner Success Program — deploy DashMart’s best practices across grocery partners
3. Peak Hour Optimization — boost driver supply from 19:00 to 00:00

👉To reproduce this on the dataset or a similar dataset, you can follow the Jupyter Notebook

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📊 Data Quality

• Data Quality: High, with minor completeness issues
• Low percentage of missing data: DELIV_DASHER_ID, DELIV_D2R, DELIV_CLAT . These gaps are unlikely to affect most analyses. Therefore, I’ve chosen to drop null rows, as these fields are essential for downstream processing
• Intentional Blanks: DELIV_CANCELLED_AT, SUBSTITUTE_ITEM_NAME, CATEGORY

🔥 Market snapshot

• Total Orders: 60,583 (Sep 16–Oct 14, 2022, Cincinnati)
• Cancellation Rate: 1.1%
• Late Delivery Rate: 4.7%
• Missing/Incorrect Rate: 2.5%

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🔥 Market Patterns & Hourly Trends

• Order Peaks: 23:00–03:00 and 18:00–22:59
• Stable Hours: 06:00–11:00
• Critical Window: 19:00–00:00 — highest concentration of late and missing deliveries
• Cancellations: Low and consistent

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🧍 Customer Experience

Order Accuracy:

• Resolution Gap: Only 8% of complaints were resolved with substitutions
• Mismatch Rate: 166 substitute items didn’t match original category

Wait Time:

• Median Acceptance Time: ~1.5 minutes
• Outliers: Up to 120 minutes
• Insights: Low-priced orders (< $0.20) ignored by drivers

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🚗 Dasher Performance

• Travel Time Impact: Longer store arrival → higher chance of late delivery
  

• Price Sensitivity:

  • Orders < $0.20 → longest wait times
  • Orders > $0.40 → fast, predictable acceptance

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🛒 Merchant Reliability

DashMart vs Grocery Stores:

• DashMart:
  • Missing Rate: 0.2%
  • Substitution Rate: 0.1%
• Grocery1:
  • Missing Rate: 14.8%

Menu Optimization:

• Share top 5 items per top 5 categories
• Help merchants stock popular items and improve substitutions

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🧠 Strategic Recommendations

1. Fix the Small Order Problem

• Batching: Combine small orders
• Minimum Fare Guarantee
• Wait-Time Bonuses

2. Transform Grocery Partnerships

• Short-Term: Launch Partner Success Program
• Long-Term: Shift toward DashMart’s scalable model

3. Reinforce Peak Hour Operations

• Driver Supply Surge: Incentivize 19:00–00:00
• Push Notifications: “Evening Rush Bonus”

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