The Shopper Experience Council (SEC) held its kickoff event in San Francisco on June 7th-8th, bringing 13 Shoppers together from across the US and Canada to meet with company leadership. The goal of the SEC is to ensure Instacart is building a better experience for all Shoppers.

This event allowed Shoppers to tell Instacart’s leadership firsthand how it really feels to shop on the Instacart platform, what’s working well, and what needs to improve. The Shoppers were joined by company leadership, including Apoorva Mehta (CEO), Max Mullen (Co-Founder), Ravi Gupta (COO/CFO), and David Hahn (Chief Product Officer), as well as specialized leaders on important topics: Shopper earnings, access to hours, support and communications, and the Shopper app. The SEC also participated in Instacart’s weekly Friday All Hands meeting, to recap their feedback to the whole company. Some examples of the feedback they shared:

Shoppers want to revisit the early access system to ensure that hours are available for the best Shoppers, who provide great customer experiences.

Shoppers would like to see a commercial product be introduced, which would allow us to treat large business orders differently, in terms of both payment and fulfillment.

Shoppers would like to see improvements in our catalog and aisle mapping to make it easier and quicker to shop orders.

Shoppers believe our support is unacceptably inconsistent in terms of response times, as well as the quality of resolutions and empathy of our agents.

Besides ensuring that regular earnings are fair and stable, Shoppers want to see Instacart build partnerships that enable third-parties to provide discounts on wireless plans, gas, and vehicle maintenance.

In addition, the SEC also helped to prioritize quick actions to improve the Shopper app. For instance, we heard how frustrating it is when Shoppers arrive at a staging area before bags are ready, or when the Shopper App prompts Shoppers to scan single items multiple times — even if these happen infrequently. Our engineering teams are already making progress on these issues and we’ll continue to work on quick fixes brought to us by the SEC.

Finally, we heard loud and clear that we can do a better job communicating with Shoppers. Suggestions from the SEC included spending more time explaining the “why” behind product and policy changes, as well as investing more in self-service resources like the Shopper Help Center — we’re taking this feedback to heart and are hiring a new Content Team to assist with this.

Overall, Instacart leaders described the event as “powerful,” “intense,” and “motivating.” Our goal as a company in the coming months is to continue learning how to improve the Shopper experience and we’re committed to embarking on this long-term journey together. Now it’s time to get to work!

Click here to learn more about the Shopper Experience Council, and check out this link to read about the kickoff experience in their own words.