Consistent and quality customer service more important than 10-minute delivery: Swiggy CTO

CHENNAI: There may not be a real customer need for 10-minute deliveries and given its downside, companies should not be pushing it, an executive from food tech decacorn Swiggy said in Chennai on Saturday.


"Personally, I agree we should not be pushing 10-minute deliveries. In fact, at Swiggy, we have been staying away from this...I don't know if there is a real customer need where people need their tomatoes in nine minutes," Dale Vaz, CTO, Swiggy, said.

“Providing customer the convenience, high quality and a reliable experience is our focus and there is a sweet spot where customers say that a 20-25-minute delivery is good enough,” he added.

Food and grocery delivery platforms have been stressing on the fastest delivery narrative with Swiggy's peers Zomato, Blinkit, Dunzo, and Zepto all highlighting the ultra-fast delivery model as their USP.

Vaz was speaking on the sidelines of tech community organisation CTOtalk's Summit in Chennai, where he gave a talk on how AI and ML power Swiggy's delivery engine.

Vaz said Swiggy was no longer just a food tech firm and was more a “convenience” company. "The idea is to build a platform on which we can launch any number of categories," he said. Swiggy has more than doubled its team in the last two years, and the tech team is now around 700-member strong engineers.

Swiggy is also working towards piloting drone deliveries in India and is working with a few drone-as-a-service startups to do this. The CTO said this was more suitable to solve inefficiencies in the middle-mile rather than last mile deliveries. “If you have a warehouse outside the city and you want to bring inventory to a pod in the city, drones can be leveraged,” Vaz said.