Improve your order success rate, Foodpanda tells customer seeking refund

Some businesses may live by the old adage that the customer is always right, but not Foodpanda — at least based on a recent exchange with a spurned customer.

The food delivery company had denied the customer's request for a refund on an incomplete order and even tasked them with improving their orders' success rate, according to a screenshot shared online on Sunday (Aug 30).

In the screenshot, the Foodpanda customer care team acknowledged the customer's complaint of a missing item in their order from Our Tampines Hub.

However, the customer was "not eligible" for a refund due to their order history, the customer care team wrote in an email.

"I would ask you to improve the success rate of your orders," they went on to say.

Identifying themself as a friend of the customer, a Reddit user called Foodpanda's response "rude and ridiculous".

They added: "Hello, is it the customer's fault that they failed to deliver items more than once? Is one supposed to personally walk over to the hawker centre and check they got the right order?"

However, others spoke up for Foodpanda and questioned if the customer had requested for a refund one too many times.

"I have already gotten three refunds from Foodpanda and never encountered anything like this. I wondered how many refunds OP (original poster) had requested before to get this kind of reply from Foodpanda," one commenter said.

In response to AsiaOne's queries, Foodpanda only said: "We would like to encourage our customers to get in touch with us at support@foodpanda.sg with their details so we may be able to assist with their feedback, requests and refunds."

According to Foodpanda's terms and conditions, customers who experience issues such as incorrect or missing items in their order are only eligible for compensation if Foodpanda determines that "the order and/or goods [they] received are not of satisfactory condition or quality".

This isn't the first time that Foodpanda's self-improvement advice to customers was not taken well.

In May, another customer complained that he was denied a refund and was also told to improve his order success rates after reportedly receiving three defective orders within a single week.

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However, in a subsequent email, the Foodpanda customer care team appeared to admit that the missing order was a result of "heavy load of orders" at the restaurant in question and granted him a refund in what they called a "one-time exemption".

At the same time, there are some who give other customers a bad name by abusing the refund option.

On Aug 24, a 17-year-old was arrested for his suspected involvement in cheating Foodpanda of over $14,000 by making fraudulent refund claims on his orders of food, groceries and liquor.

kimberlylim@asiaone.com