My friend who works in a leading IT multinational corporation tells me that an email sent from the second floor to the third floor of his office building in Bangalore actually goes via the company’s regional mail server in Sydney, Australia.
When they hear this, many people gasp “Whaaaat?” But, apart from that momentary reaction, nobody cares how digital content travels.
Not so when it comes to physical goods. The routing of documents, samples and parcels determines their delivery duration and cost, two things most people do care about.
In what’s cited as a breakthrough innovation of its era, FedEx pioneered the hub-and-spoke (H&S) distribution model for parcel delivery in the 1970s. Since then, courier companies have stopped shipping consignments directly from sender to receiver. The way H&S works, when you send something to me, the courier company collects the item from your location (say A) and stores it temporarily at its spoke located nearest to you (P). From P, it sends the item to the hub (located at Q). It ships the item from Q to the spoke nearest to me (R), from where it delivers it to my location (B). So, the path taken by the item is A –> P –> Q –> R –> B.
Not A –> B.
Now, this is an oversimplification of the hub-and-spoke model. The way it works in real life, there could be a few more hops along the way. H&S also does weird stuff like routing a parcel from Washington D.C to McLean Virginia – virtually a suburb of D.C that’s situated 20 kilometers away – via Memphis, Tennessee, which is 1400 kms away! FedEx alludes to the perceived wasteful nature of bringing all consignments to a central hub but defends it on the grounds that the hub-and-spoke model is the only way to provide reliable delivery at scale. I remember reading a front page story on London Times about the route taken by a consignment from one city in Europe to another city in Europe – memory serves, it criss-crossed between Europe and the USA twice!
While hub-and-spoke is credited with giving a major fillip to the courier industry, it’s not the best of operating models for short distances – it would take 24-48 hours to make a delivery 10 kms away.
There are times at work and at home when I need to run an errand urgently and I can’t do it by myself because of lack of time or expertise or both. Examples of such errands include tasks like:
- Send documents to CA
- Buy copier paper
- Send a gift to a friend.
While courier companies can handle these errands, they take a very long time and often cost a lot of money. Ergo, I’ve been looking for a “runner” service to run around on my behalf to complete such tasks.
Enter Dunzo.
The company bills itself thus:
“We run tasks to free up your day. So be it a pick up-drop, shopping, groceries or food, dunzo it all away!”
Contrary to courier companies that use the hub-and-spoke model, a runner service uses the point-to-point distribution model and is therefore able to complete short distance deliveries within minutes or hours, not days.
While Dunzo has been around in Bangalore for a couple of years, it launched in Pune – the city where I live – only a couple of months ago.
Since I’ve been looking for a service exactly like Dunzo for a long time, I wasted no time in trying it out.
What follows is an account of my experience with Dunzo.
TASK 1: SEND DOCUMENTS TO CA
I regularly need to send my company’s bills, vouchers and other “accounting raw material” to our Chartered Accountant for processing the books of accounts.
In the past, I’d use a regular courier. Even though my CA’s office is located barely 10 kms away, the courier would typically take two days to make the delivery. (There are times when couriers have taken 15 days for a local delivery but that’s a story for another day.)
On this occasion, I decided to try Dunzo.
I tapped the PICKUP/DROP button on the app’s splash screen.
The next step was to specify the pickup location. The auto location finder feature hung.
I closed the app, restarted it and tried to enter the address manually. I entered “Silver Oak COHS” but the app kept saving it as “33 Neelanjali Society”, which is a housing complex situated half a kilometer away from my address. I tried to edit the address. Despite several attempts, I couldn’t get rid of the “Neelanjali Society” bit. I finally decided to ignore it since I face the same issue with a popular food delivery app and a rideshare app (not Uber).
I then scheduled the pickup for 11AM on the next day. At the time of placing the order, the app displayed a charge of INR 0.00 but warned me that the actual price would be computed and shown only 30 minutes prior to pickup time.
I realized later that 11AM was a bit too early and rescheduled the pickup time to 12:30PM. The app confirmed the revised pickup time.
I didn’t get any notification of price the next morning. However, a delivery boy called at around 10:30AM to ask for directions to the pickup location. Although my office is next to a famous landmark, he needed three telephone calls to reach it.
Dunzo’s delivery boy is not alone in needing guidance to reach pickup locations. It happens with the delivery boys / drivers of virtually all new-age companies. Contrary to what these companies claim, consumer-grade technology can’t help delivery boys reach a location on their own. Only local knowledge can.
Knowledge of local topography still trumps GPS + Google Maps. @andyjayhawk @verge provides an awesome explanation of why Uber drivers – and delivery boys – are unable to reach your pickup / delivery location without calling you. https://t.co/XbuLXPWze9
— S.Ketharaman (@s_ketharaman) June 1, 2018
Sooner they realize this, the better for these companies. But I digress.
Dunzo’s delivery boy didn’t know that I’d changed the pickup time to 12:30PM. Luckily, my papers were ready and I was able to hand them over to the delivery boy even though he turned up early.
I asked him about the fees. He said Dunzo had waived all charges during the first two months’ introductory period.
That’s it. Off he went with my documents and delivered them to my CA’s office within two hours without any further handholding from me.
Dunzo accomplished in two hours what used to take me (at least) two days in the past.
TASK 2: BUY COPIER PAPER
I tapped BUY, which was the only other button I could see on the Dunzo app at the time. (Dunzo has added a few more buttons now – more on that in a bit.)
I entered “A4 Copier Paper” and tapped CONTINUE.
The chat window opened asking me to enter the pickup location.
Duh.
I expected Dunzo to decide where to buy the product from instead of asking me. When I tried to convey this message via the chat box, the app froze. I killed it and moved on, thinking that was the end of it.
But no.
An hour later, a Dunzo delivery boy called me from a stationery store and asked me which brand of paper he should buy! I was left wondering why the app asked me to enter the pickup location when the delivery boy knew which shop to go to and had already gone there.
I told him I didn’t confirm the order. He said okay and “canceled” the order that I never placed.
TASK 3: EXPLORE NEW BUTTONS
I explored the new buttons in the app. I noticed that the BUY button was replaced by an ORDER button. When I tapped it, most options that followed looked like a decomposition of the missing BUY button into different product categories that already existed rather than anything new. I tapped around here and there until I suddenly saw a screen saying “order in progress”. Apparently I’d ordered a task without realizing it! Duh again.
In my limited exposure to it, I can vouch that Dunzo does the job.
However, the app is quite buggy and crashes quite frequently.
There are many duh moments in the app’s UI and UX. It’s hard to make out which button provides more information versus which button confirms an order. Wish the buttons were color-coded so that I know upfront that I’m committing myself to an order. I can’t pull up “dunzo chat support” on demand – the box appears and disappears on its whim!
Overall, Dunzo works as advertised, but it’s difficult to figure out what it advertises!
It’s still early days. I’m sure Dunzo’s UI, UX and CX will all become better over time because of the following reasons:
Soon after I tried Dunzo, I spread the word around in my personal and professional circles. At least two people I know have tried it out and both are satisfied with it- Unlike in the past, I was able to tell Dunzo to cancel the order when I had the recent mishap with its app.
The next time you need to run an errand, give Dunzo a try and share and share your experience in the comments below.