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Challenges
Deliveroo’s mission is to transform the way people shop and eat – bringing the neighbourhood to their doors by connecting consumers, restaurants, shops, and riders.
Operating one of Europe’s largest on-demand delivery networks, with millions of consumers and more than 176,000 local businesses, Deliveroo is focused on maintaining service quality at scale through constant communication across its network.
To support rapid growth across multiple markets and languages, Deliveroo’s teams continually explore new innovations to improve the experience for riders, partners, and consumers.
With teams operating across multiple regions and languages, Deliveroo was looking for a way to improve the rider onboarding process, and to help restaurants maximize orders, while maintaining accuracy and trust.
As Deliveroo scales, streamlining rider onboarding is essential in order to meet demand whilst delivering a consistent and high-quality user experience.
Deliveroo’s rider onboarding process includes several steps that help ensure applicants are verified and ready to begin delivering.
However, Deliveroo found that a portion of applicants tended to drop off before completing the onboarding, and subsequent outreach to re-engage these riders was time-intensive and inconsistent across regions.
Deliveroo’s operations teams manage a large and varied network of restaurant partners. Maintaining accurate live status data for each restaurant is critical to ensuring reliable consumer experiences and efficient rider allocation.
Traditionally, this process required restaurant support teams to make thousands of calls each week to verify whether or not restaurants reported as “closed” by riders were, in fact, operational.
Following the success of its other pilots, Deliveroo extended its partnership with ElevenLabs to drive partner activation of Rider Check-In (RCI) tags – a key operational tool to streamline order handover between restaurants and riders.
Solution
To address this issue, Deliveroo deployed an ElevenLabs Agent to automatically contact rider applicants who had been inactive for more than two weeks.
The voice agent confirmed the applicant’s continued interest and guided them through the next steps to help them complete onboarding in their preferred language.
By leveraging agentic support, Deliveroo reached thousands of riders in hours instead of days or weeks. This reduced manual workload for local operations teams, allowing them to focus on more strategic work like unique edge cases where they could offer more personalized support, and improved overall rider activation rates.
To streamline this process and help businesses maximize orders during opening hours, Deliveroo deployed an ElevenLabs Agent to automatically confirm the live status of restaurants flagged as potentially closed. The agent placed outbound calls, validated opening hours, and updated Deliveroo’s systems in real time.
Together they developed an ElevenLabs Agent that would proactively contact sites that had not activated tags after five business days of delivery, with the goal of guiding managers through installation and activation steps.
Amy Marangon, Senior Manager Operations Strategy at Deliveroo, highlighted how quickly the team was able to launch multiple agents:
“The ElevenLabs platform is very intuitive, and the support from the ElevenLabs engineering team made deployment really efficient.“
Results
The results in the first few weeks of deployment showed a substantial increase in engagement and throughout:
The agent reached the majority of the target cohort via call or voicemail.
30% of riders confirmed their intent to continue onboarding and continued their application within seven days of the call.
Over the evaluation period, ElevenLabs Agents achieved a 75% success rate in reaching restaurants by phone using a voice agent to verify operating hours.
This eliminated the need for thousands of manual check-ins and enabled Deliveroo to monitor the network’s live status in a fraction of the time previously required, enabling the team to focus on higher-impact operational tasks.
The Deliveroo team highlighted how impressed they were with the ElevenLabs Agents platform’s ability to achieve their goals:
“ElevenLabs Agents has transformed our operational efficiency, giving us real-time visibility into network status and helping our partners confirm their live status.“
In early results, Deliveroo’s ElevenLabs Agent was able to successfully contact 86% of partner sites, helping to drive meaningful increases in activation.
By automating these interactions, Deliveroo was able to improve partner communications and the overall consumer experience through faster, more reliable deliveries.
Summary of results with ElevenLabs Agents
- Rider onboarding re-engagement contact rate > 80% of riders reached
- Restaurant verification success rate – 75% of restaurants verified
- Partner site rider tag activation contact rate – 86% of partner sites reached
With proven results across rider, restaurant, and partner operations, Deliveroo has demonstrated how intelligent automation can drive measurable efficiency, stronger engagement, and a better experience for riders, restaurants, and consumers alike.
This post has been re-published by kind permission of ElevenLabs – view the original article.
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell
