How do I brief a new country team on delivery monitoring?
Restaurant chains hand a new market a policy document and get compliance theatre back. What a country team actually needs is four short pages, and three of them have to be written locally because the platforms behave differently there. One page on what the group measures and why. One on what each availability state means on the platforms in that market. One on who calls whom, with names. And one on what the platform is obliged to tell you when it restricts a listing, which in the European Union is more than most teams realise.
Page one: what we measure and why
Availability against published hours, promotion visibility, price consistency, coverage. In that order of priority.
The important part of this page is not the list, it is the reason. A team that understands the storefront can be closed while the kitchen is open will act on an alert. A team that does not will assume the alert is wrong.
Include the one sentence that changes behaviour: a portal shows what your account holds, and a customer sees something else.
Page two: what each state means, locally
Every availability state on every platform in that market, with three columns. Does it stop customers ordering. Does it end on its own. Who can clear it.
This page cannot be copied from another market. The same word carries different meanings on different platforms, and busy in particular means trading with a delay on one and closed on another.
Getting this wrong produces the most common self-inflicted outage there is: a manager choosing a state that means something other than they intended.
Page three: who calls whom
Names, not roles, and a route that works in the evening.
Most incidents are ended at the site in under a minute by somebody who has been told. The failure is not capability, it is that nobody knows who to call at nine at night. Write it down, including the central owner who receives alerts and is allowed to phone a site directly.
Include the platform escalation path for that market too, since support hours and routes differ by country.
Page four: what the platform owes you
For markets in the European Union, four things, and they are worth quoting.
A statement of reasons for a restriction or suspension “prior to or at the time” it takes effect, on a durable medium. Thirty days notice with reasons before service is terminated. The main ranking parameters set out in the terms. And an internal complaint system that is “easily accessible and free of charge for business users”.
A team that knows this asks for the right thing on the night. A team that does not opens a support ticket and waits.
What should not be in the briefing?
Anything about how the group’s reporting works internally, and any target the team cannot influence.
The measurement should arrive as a short exception list with names against it. Assembling it is Kitchain (kitchain.co)’s job and acting on the lines is the team’s, and confusing the two is how a country team ends up doing data entry instead of operations.
How long before it sticks?
One quarter, and the sign is that incidents get shorter rather than fewer.
Shorter means people are ending them. Fewer comes later, when the repeat offenders get permanent fixes. Expecting fewer first leads groups to conclude the programme is not working while it is working exactly as it should.