The operations of entrepreneurial companies are often immature. They make mistakes while correcting them, and grow rapidly in this way. However, when shortcomings in operational capabilities are exposed all at once, it sometimes brings disastrous results to themselves. . Recently, pidan has suffered heavy losses due to this: with a high-looking cat toilet, pidan has established their reputation in the cat circle. And because of a bad cat feeding service, pidan ruined its brand in the cat circle.

[Commercial Street Detective] has sorted out the entire incident, hoping to provide some inspiration to more entrepreneurial companies.

Case review: door-to-door The service has become a door-to-door service

pidan (Chinese name "PI Dan") was founded in 2015. It is a developer of pet cat products. It specializes in mid-to-high-end daily necessities for pet cats. With excellent products Known for its R&D capabilities and high-looking products.

In 2016, pidan launched a "Snow House" cat toilet. This toilet won a design award and gained pidan a good reputation in the cat circle. It was nicknamed "the most aesthetic cat" Supplies Brand”. This word-of-mouth eventually translated into huge sales power and capital attention. In 2017, pidan completed sales of 35 million. In July 2018, pidan completed another Series B financing of 60 million yuan.

At that time, pidan was a rising star in the pet products industry.

The proud pidan launched a new service attempt on the eve of the Spring Festival in 2019 - "pidancare" door-to-door cat feeding service. For those who are going home for the New Year, this service can be described as a considerate medicine, which has attracted the attention of Maoquan and enthusiastically placed orders. For pidan, if this attempt is successful, it will not only bring pidan closer to consumers, but also expand its service territory and enter a new field.

But a good beginning did not bring good results, and even this attempt was tantamount to a disaster for pidan. Users purchased pidan's service at a high price in the hope that their cats would be properly taken care of while they were away from home. As a result, many users reported that pidan's service staff did not come to their homes at all, and some users who received "door-to-door service" also had a hard time - their cats were not well cared for by pidan. The reason for getting sick. After the incident, pidan's response strategy did not make consumers feel sincerity. Not only did it not resolve their anger, it actually added fuel to the fire.

Word of mouth is something that accumulates slowly but is consumed quickly, especially in small circles like Maoquan, where information is often transmitted more quickly. Due to pidan's repeated mistakes in its operation, its reputation in the cat circle suffered a heavy blow in just a few weeks.

Beforehand: Lack of manpower reserves

The feeding business is a manpower business. There are two basic business requirements: first, the number of people is sufficient, and second, the professional quality of the people is up to standard, and pidan failed on both of these points.

First of all, the Spring Festival is a period of manpower shortage, with huge demand and tight manpower, so we can only temporarily recruit additional manpower in addition to the original full-time employees. However, according to pidan CEO’s girlfriend’s own circle of friends, temporary employees left one after another during the New Year’s Eve hiring period, with the turnover rate as high as 2/3. A project with human resources as its core resource will actually cause a huge loss of human resources when it is launched? These explanations are really hard to understand.

Currently, there are two speculations about the reasons for the resignation of temporary employees: There are rumors that these departures are due to internal labor cost control, and they believe that the current manpower is enough to cope with the order volume, so they fired some temporary employees; It is also said that temporary employees resigned on their own because the daily salary of 150 to 200 yuan was not enough to cope with the unbalanced and skyrocketing order volume.

Secondly, there was a serious "misoperation" in pidan's door-to-door service.

As you can see on the product details page of the feeding service, the description of the pet observer is 100% full-time, pet-raising experience, and 40 hours of training and assessment. It is definitely impossible to be 100% full-time, but for temporary employees, basic business training should still be provided. After all, a life's health and even life and death are involved. Pidan's training process for observers has not been disclosed, but in actual services, some observers could not distinguish between cat litter and cat food, and fed cat litter as cat food. Some observers did not know how to use Pidan's own drinking fountains, resulting in The kittens were hungry and thirsty... which directly led to various reactions such as vomiting and blood in the stool, making cat parents who paid high prices for professional services angry and anxious. If the employee's professional level is like this, we can infer the quality of Pidan's training.

Faced with a large number of orders, especially during a manpower shortage period like the Spring Festival, there is no basic manpower reserve and emergency plan. The personnel are not well trained, and the errors that occur are novice-level bugs. It is incredible that such a situation occurs in a door-to-door service project.

What happened: Chaotic order management

[Commercial Street Detective] found that pidan’s on-site service this time was not only inherently deficient, but also full of pitfalls: in specific operations, such as They also made a series of mistakes in aspects such as managing keys and order distribution.

The process of feeding service should be collecting keys - assigning orders by area - door-to-door service - returning keys. The order volume of pidan is large and the area is wide. A reasonable approach is to initially organize the keys according to the area during the key collection process, and mark the detailed information as much as possible for the convenience of the salesperson.

And pidan's approach Yes, only the order number and date are marked on the key, and a dedicated person will correspond to the order details and distribute the key. The official statement is to protect guest privacy through information partition. The starting point was good, but the result was poor process design, which naturally caused many problems. Manpower is wasted, a large number of keys are lost, and the customer address and order cannot be matched. It is necessary to return to the system over and over again to find details, which seriously affects the feeding efficiency.

According to the self-media "Care for the Shit Shoveler", some observers reported that the dispatch order they received showed that the head of the household had a smart lock, but when they arrived, they found it was a password lock. They heard a cat meowing anxiously at the door. But there was no way to open the door or contact the owner. When it was relayed to the owner through customer service, the observer had already rushed to the next store because he needed to deal with the backlog of orders, and could not go back to solve the problem.

The lack of effective route planning and order management has brought great difficulties to the work of observers. Some observers work in one area, while others are forced to go around the city and turn back. A helpful observer said that he ran from downtown Shanghai all the way to Lake Meilan at the end of Line 7. The surge in order volume, secondary situations, and unplanned order dispatch have increased the traveling costs of observers, making them miserable and often working until early in the morning. Even so, it still cannot effectively put out the fire.

In terms of process management, from the management of keys, to the distribution of orders, to the management of personnel, pidan did not have a reasonable plan. It made mistakes and made mistakes, which led to serious consequences. The conflict over feeding services has finally erupted on the Internet.

After the event: Failed recovery and public relations

After the outbreak, how did pidan handle it?

Perhaps the manpower is really unable to take care of it. After the order key was mismatched and feeding the cat was delayed, Pidan did not communicate with the owner to remedy the situation, but waited for the owner to be held accountable.

After the public opinion fermented on February 3, pidan officials took action to recruit people to supplement manpower. According to the IT Times, "the wages of all pidan observers are settled by pidan, and the increase is 350 yuan/ 6 orders per day, an additional 100 yuan will be added for each additional order. In addition, pidan has also invited friends, users, cat rescuers and other public welfare organizations to come and help.”

The version circulating on the Internet is completely different from this. different.

On the 4th, some netizens asked on the official account whether they needed a caregiver, but the official customer service responded that they did not.

Non-profit organizations Shanghai Adoption Home and Sutang Home spontaneously helped pidancare with the aftermath of the accident, providing free door-to-door feeding and suitable door-to-door personnel. However, because pidan officially designated it as an official business partner, the Shanghai Adoption Home angrily issued a statement that it had no commercial cooperation with pidan and that the rescue was purely spontaneous.

According to information provided by netizens who participated in the assistance, pidan put forward the following conditions to the kind-hearted rescuers and cat lovers: they cannot accept one or two orders, and if they want assistance, they must accept at least 10 orders, and they must complete 12 The taxi fare can only be reimbursed if the order is 1,000 yuan. During the Spring Festival, pidan charges 159 yuan per order.

If it was dissatisfaction with high premiums and low-quality services before, this round of customer service's cookie-cutter tactics, inability to rescue at critical nodes, and the calculation of capital preservation behind it have ignited the anger of parents. Related Weibo hot searches that were removed within three hours only added fuel to the anger. Even if pidan issued a compensation plan, it still could not be calmed down. After this battle, the reputation and goodwill that pidan had so easily accumulated could be said to have fallen short. Under the solution's Weibo, there are still hundreds of cat owners who plan to fight with them to the end.

Case summary: pidan’s opportunity turned into a crisis

For families with pets, how to deal with their pets’ life when they are not at home is a big problem. Currently, the mainstream foster care services on the market are mainly pet shops, pet hospitals, and home foster care. However, there are still limitations such as the hygienic conditions and comfort of the foster care environment, as well as the cats’ unsuitability.

The door-to-door pet feeding service puts pets in their original environment and solves the above dilemma. At present, door-to-door feeding services are mainly provided by small self-employed businesses, which are highly regional and there is no leading brand that operates on a large scale. Having received Series B financing and establishing an image of mid-to-high-end pet products, pidan is naturally a big brand that can easily win the trust of customers. But this time I tried to test the waters, I suffered heavy losses. I lost a lot of money and reputation, and the gains outweighed the losses.

pidan’s failure exposed its many shortcomings in human training, order management, process planning and customer service and public relations. The combined outbreak of these shortcomings caused a crisis for pidan, which not only impacted its business, but may even affect its subsequent financing rhythm to a certain extent. [Business Street Detective] will pay more attention to pidan, hoping that after experiencing this storm, pidan can regain market recognition through efforts, and also hopes that other entrepreneurs with similar characteristics can learn from it.