[MUSIC PLAYING]
NICK MARTIN: Welcome to this virtual fireside
chat with Just Eat.
My name's Nick Martin, I'm Head of Retail at Google Cloud
here in the UK.
And I'm delighted to be joined by Dave Williams and Storm
Fagan from Just Eat.
DAVE WILLIAMS: I'm Dave Williams.
I'm chief information officer at Just Eat.
What that means is my job is focused on the security,
stability, and scalability of Just Eat's
e-commerce platforms.
I'm also lucky enough to provide all of the other Just Eaters
with the awesome tech they use to do their jobs.
STORM FAGAN: Hi, and I'm Storm Fagan.
I'm chief product officer at Just Eat.
And I work with my teams to create the products
that our 26 million customers and 155,000 restaurants
around the world use every day.
And I work really closely with Dave.
And I'm, I guess, a kind of chief requester of cool things
from Dave's technology arsenal.
NICK MARTIN: So Storm, first question for you if I may.
To help better understand the role of technology at Just Eat
for those watching, please could you
describe a couple of the ways Just Eat is deriving business
and value from Google Cloud?
STORM FAGAN: Absolutely, so I think recommendations
and data segmentation is probably
a really good example of that.
So what we find in e-commerce now
is that the volume of choice that's available
can be overwhelming for customers.
And it can be difficult for suppliers
to be able to understand how to drive growth
and how to build their business.
And we use the data segmentation and turn that
into recommendations to really cut down on that volume
and reduce that overwhelming feeling for customers
and then connect customers and restaurants together,
who otherwise might not be finding each other.
And really at Just Eat, we're just
a collection of neighborhoods across the world.
Our business is really about the small communities,
the small businesses in those communities.
And we're really using the sort of a scale of our data
to help those small businesses thrive.
DAVE WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think a huge one for our fellow
Just Eaters is G Suite, which we use
across the group as a whole.
So now that we're part of Just Eat, takeaway.com, as a group,
we've got thousands of employees in 22 countries.
And actually, over the last three months,
as we've come to terms with working under COVID-19,
we've seen a huge increase in the use
of G Suite for collaboration.
And we've actually seen our use of Google
Meet increase by more than 200%.
And myself, Storm, and colleagues
have added over a million new files to Google Drive
during that period.
So it's really critical to us in how we operate.
And it's great also to see Google adding new features
to make that even easier, like the tiled view
within Google Meet, of which we're all massive fans.
NICK MARTIN: Dave you mentioned the COVID situation.
Storm, maybe I could ask you how Just
Eat have responded to the current situation recently.
STORM FAGAN: done a huge amount of work
to help our ecosystem over the last few weeks and months.
And it's been an incredibly intense time for us
as a group of colleagues.
So firstly, we've ensured that we're
complying with all of the guidelines that ensure we can
deliver safely to customers.
And that's protecting both our customers
and making sure that we can continue
to deliver to vulnerable people and protecting our couriers
as well, who are still working during this time.
So that's been different across the markets
as each market has reacted differently.
And then we've really focused on the ecosystem
itself, so how we can put a support package in place
for our restaurants and which, when we combine that
with the way that we use data and how we can understand
customer behavior's changing, how restaurant behaviors are
changing as everyone's working to adapt
to kind of the new normal.
And we've really been able--
I feel really proud of how we've been
able to support small businesses and local communities.
And then we've extended that out to how
we can support charities, how we can support frontline workers.
So it's been a very intense time for us.
But I'm incredibly proud of the teams.
And the collaboration tooling, actually,
that we have through Google has been incredibly useful.
And it's helped keep our productivity high,
helped us solve these problems in a really fast turnaround way
and [? makes ?] sure that sort of collaboration
and that knowledge sharing is continuing, even though we're
all in lockdown.
DAVE WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think one of the things that's really
helped us move quickly during this period
has been-- we were really early to establish
the principles by which we would operate as an organization,
not only in terms of how we would treat our colleagues
but actually what we wanted to do
for our customers, our restaurant
partners, and our couriers.
That made it quicker for us to make decisions.
Afterwards, once we understood those principles,
we could align to them.
For our colleagues for Just Eaters,
we made sure they could work from home.
We increased our VPN capacity 700%
just before lockdowns started in the UK.
We did live testing.
We made sure that large scale working from home could work.
And that gave the organization the confidence
that we had a workable solution.
It gave colleagues a heads up on what
they might need to be able to make things work at home.
And it's amazing the way that Just Eaters have stepped up
to that challenge, not only in the way
they've delivered for one another, customers, restaurant
partners, careers, NHS workers, key workers, all
of those efforts, but the way they've supported
one another in difficult times.
So we've seen Google Meet used for everything from water
cooler dropping conversations that run for a whole day
and you can just join in and chat,
to competitive games of Pictionary,
to DJing, and every possible thing between.
So it's become where the conversation is.
NICK MARTIN: As a digital first company,
it could be assumed that Just Eat would
have been better prepared to adapt to the situation.
In reality, has this actually been
the case and what have been some of the things that
have surprised you most during this time?
DAVE WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think the way
in which Just Eat has always operated
with globally distributed teams who are experienced
at collaborating remotely definitely put us
in a strong position to react to the world over the last three
or four months.
And the way in which we concentrate
on operational excellence for our e-commerce platforms
has helped us deal with volatility in the markets.
A couple of things that have surprised me, personally,
over the last couple of months are
the changes in customer behavior that Storm
talked about earlier.
And so we're seeing customers are eating earlier.
And more and more customers are preordering their meals
more than ever before, which I think shows
how much our commute and the trip to and from the office
shapes our dining habits.
What's not surprised me is the amazing way
that our restaurant partners have pitched in
to serve their communities.
If you go to the Just Eat Twitter,
you'll see the Good Deed Feed, which
lists loads and loads of examples
of where our restaurant partners are going
beyond and above to support their communities
with the things that they can do.
STORM FAGAN: It is amazing.
And I think two things I've really noticed
are, one, that the bit that has been removed for us
has been the sort of in-person workshops.
We're quite a collaborative organization.
And that to begin with was quite a change
even though a lot of people are sort of
used to working in a distributed way.
So that sort of collaboration piece
has become incredibly important.
And we've looked at different ways of knowledge sharing.
So whereas we were quite a visual organization,
we've moved much more into sort of the written format which
has been quite interesting.
And then coming back to that behavior change piece
and how we're using the data and how
we're using the sort of Google Cloud
products is a really sort of sensitive approach to business
at the moment, where we're really trying to understand
the situation that restaurants are finding themselves
and where we see they're trying to deal with sort of business
operations during lockdown and what
that means and sort of increasing change
in the customer behavior.
And actually, that's provided some sort of volatility
at the local community level.
And we've been able to really support that
and sort of help businesses feel comfortable,
help them get back online, sort of help those communities keep
going but in a way that is really
sensitive to the situation that everyone's finding themselves
in.
NICK MARTIN: So, Dave, as an industry,
what lessons do you think have been learned about the role
technology should be playing going forward?
DAVE WILLIAMS: I think for me the first thing
and the key focus is do what you do and do it brilliantly.
I think there will be lots of organizations looking
to diversify as a result of what many businesses have
been through over the last few months.
And technology can be an incredible enabler
for that kind of change.
I think how Just East has succeeded
is we focused in on those things we already do brilliantly.
We already care massively about our colleagues, our customers,
our restaurant partners, and our career network
in the markets in which we operate.
And by focusing in on those, following
the principles that we set up early,
I think that's really helped us succeed.
So I think that's a real lesson there for industry.
It isn't about diversification for the sake
of diversification.
I think it's about how do you play
to the strengths of your organization
whilst you face into those challenges and taking
care of the whole community of stakeholders,
recognizing that communication is absolutely key.
You can never talk enough to your colleagues,
to your customers, you partners that you're working with.
And in these difficult and trying times,
you may not have new information for people.
But being contactable and out there and able to say to them,
look we're in this with you.
We're here to support you, we want
the best for you, your family.
And everything you're going through,
is incredibly powerful.
And I would hope that organizations
take this opportunity to act with empathy,
which I think a number of organizations
have been doing brilliantly and carry that
on into their normal business models as they go onward.
NICK MARTIN: Well, that's the end of the question.
So I'd just like to say a huge thank you to you Dave Williams
and Storm Fagan for joining us on this virtual fireside chat
today.
Thank you very much indeed.
BOTH: Thanks, Nick.