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Whenever you drive for Doordash, you have to maintain a few things to ensure that you can continue to drive on the platform. One of those would be your ratings with Doordash's platform.
That being said there are some that are more important than others and I think it is important to know what you absolutely need to maintain, and what really isn't important at all.
There have also been a huge number of updates and changes from how they initially used this tab that have overall improved the quality of the software which leads to a higher quality dasher experience.
So in an attempt to properly prepare you for a successful experience with Doordash, I am going to go into a full breakdown of the Ratings page for both general and drive, what is important about each of these ratings and how you can make this work for you!
Before we do that though, My name is Joseph Mandracchia, I have been making money using driving apps on a full-time basis since mid-late 2018 and have completed over 7500 deliveries. It is my hope to impart some of my knowledge to you to help you succeed in the gig economy!
General Ratings
So General Ratings, is the main section where all your ratings from Dashing normally are calculated and complied together into this section.
This section would be the more important section because you use this all the time and you need to calculate all aspects
This sections is divided into 5 parts, number of contract violations, customer ratings, acceptance rate, on-time or early rate, and the total number of lifetime deliveries.
Some aspects of these menus are in development and some people either can't see them yet or they just don't apply to you yet, or maybe it did at a time and you worked it off.
So let's really unpack this and go deep into detail on the aspects of this page.
Number of Contract Violations
The first thing you may see on your ratings page is the number of Contract Violations you received on your Dasher account. This is one of the more recent development and kind of scary ways someone can be rated on.
A contract violation is simply put is a something you receive when you break the terms of your Independent Contractor Agreement, which at that point Doordash can potentially deactivate you.
The most common ways people can be given a contract violation that have been identified by other Dashers, is extreme lateness and order never arrived.
Now I say it's scary because at first glance it seems that way, and when you get a contract violation it feels that way and I can understand the stress of that all too well.
Though, I will say if you drive responsibly, you do the work you are committing to and you know how to handle the situations that may come up, you will be fine even if you do get one.
Just because they can deactivate you from this, doesn't mean they definitely will. They do understand extenuating circumstances and they do have a specialized team that will look into that for you that are proven to be very effective in their work.
In the event that you do get one and you don't get deactivated (most likely if you aren't constantly getting them), then it will stay on your account until you complete 100, what they define as, eligible deliveries.
Which goes into that category of terms Doordash uses that are vague and confusing, right along side desirability, which is an actual metric for the calculation of the Doordash Pay Model.
There is an actual fact checked answer for this though, an eligible delivery is an order which is accepted and completed.
Honestly though, I say it's vague and confusing but I don't know what word I would put in its place that allows me the flexibility to adjust it, in case I need to make an edit to the system without rewriting it.
Once you get through 100 the rating should either show as 0 or just disappear. Which is why some people have never seen it before.
Customer Rating
The customer rating is based on the ratings customers give you when you deliver their food and is ran by a 5.00 system that is calculated on a rolling basis.
The customer can choose to rate you 1-5 stars on your overall, add some additional ratings and make any commentary about how you handled the order itself.
Your ratings are based on the last 100 deliveries you have been rated on, whether they gave you the rating right away or waited an extended period of time.
This is a tougher rating to go by, because as much as you do have control over how you handle yourself as a Dasher, you can't control the customer actually rating you well, if at all.
However, they did develop a system to where they filter out unfair ratings so they won't go against you so you know you won't have your ratings affect you if the customer gave you less than a perfect score for unfair reasons.
You know the teacher who refuses to give A or 100's because of his opinions on what actually earns a score like that or "there is always room for improvement"? Yeah, they have no say here.
Now in recent times they really built out this page to what metrics they give customers to rate you on and all the comments of customers that you delivered to, some people can access it right now and some can't as of yet.
Doordash is a company that always tinkers around a bit with their software so they can test things and certain markets, fix problems that come up and continuously looking for ways to improve their software, so if you don't see it yet don't worry.
This shows you quite a number of details which is good because now we see what metrics we are being measured with and how we personally are doing in each area.
As of January 2021, the details include:
Our Average Customer Rating
The Breakdown of Our Customer Rating
Customer Feedback in Specific Area's of Service
Customer Compliments and Exact Quotes
With that said, the most actionable thing on this page is the customer feedback in the specific areas that we see on this page.
Customer's have an opportunity to vote thumbs up or down on certain area's of service when rating you on you delivery services. You are rated on communication, followed instructions, order handling and friendliness.
Let's unpack this even further so we can take actionable steps to help you earn more 5 star ratings and maintain a positive status on your account.
Communication
The first thing that customers have an opportunity to rate you on is your communication with them on the status of the order.
Whether that is while you are at the restaurant, on the way to the customer or arriving at the customers location, it is important to always communicate with the customer on how the order is proceeding or if you should have a challenge with the order itself.
Now I get that there isn't going to be a challenge during every order and some orders it would be much more appreciated by the customer if you chose to just get the order and get over there, and that is very true.
However, for the orders that are going to take and excessive amount of time and energy to do, I would recommend taking the time to send a simple text to explain the delays and keep the customer updated on the status of the order.
Followed Instructions
The next area of service you are rated on is how well you followed the customers instructions that they had placed on the order prior to you receiving it.
You will see instructions when you receive the order or if you look in the hamburger menu and click on the customers name, you will see the instructions to the order.
The instructions a customer may leave are: Hand it to the Customer, or leave it at the door, whether or not you should ring the bell, whether or not you should knock, challenges you may have when arriving to the customers location, etc.
Now my best practice is simply put when you pick up the order, look at the instructions and just before dropping it off, look at them again. Make sure you do what is specified in the app and move on.
Order Handling
The third area of customer service a customer can rate you on is how well you handled their food upon delivering their order to them.
This can be a bit misleading because Doordash has made clear that you are not going to be penalized for missing items and the restaurants are expected to seal their bags so let me be clear on what this really means.
Ordering handling includes the overall presentation of their food, like the condition of the food itself.
I am sure you have seen online a picture of a pizza that has the cheese stuck to the top of the box and order that look like they are clearly dropped or shaken, which is a perfect example of not handling food properly.
Some of these things are preventable and some are inevitable, but let's go over some common ways an order can be messed up from when you receive an order to the point of delivery, and how you can prevent them.
Bag and Container Breaks and Spills
One of the most common and frustrating order handling mess ups in the history of order handling is the bag or container of your customers order breaking open and spilling everywhere.
It's that feeling of "Son of a b****! What do I do? How do I fix it?" and sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. If you have a spare disposable bag in your car you can double bag it but if not, we you are SOL.
So for potential bag breaks, I would recommend keeping a set of plastic bags in your car to either double or triple bagging if it seems obvious that the bag is not stable and it will break.
The ones you get from you local grocery store are fine, shopping bags are good to have too. So I would recommend not being so quick to throw them out and keep some in the car with you.
This is a bit more challenging for drinks however, because there are some places who have good cup holders and some that don't and having a bunch of those is much harder than having bags.
This is especially true for the customer who wants more than 4 drinks at a time and you have to almost juggle them and struggle just to get them to your car, let alone your customer!
For this, I would recommend a personal cup holder for yourself with a handle that comes up the middle so you don't have to hold 8 drinks like holding 2 pizza boxes.
Hard Stop Seat Falls
The next most common order handling challenge is what I like to call hard stop seat falls, which is when the order falls from the front seat of your vehicle to the floor of your vehicle, because you hit the brakes while driving resulting in the order being messed up.
So imagine this with me, you are driving responsibly down the road approaching the intersection that you just need to pass through, and you are behind a driver on a single lane road.
The green light turns yellow and the driver in front of you decides to hard stop on yellow, and you are forced to do the same jolting your vehicle forward, the force of the car stopping propels your order from the seat and you try to save it to no avail.
This is a very frustrating feeling, not because of the idiot driver in front of you, and yes he is an idiot, it is because there were preventative actions you could have taken.
Strapping in the order with the seat belt, putting the order in a cardboard box or better yet a hot bag on the floor of the vehicle so it wouldn't fall on the floor in first place, not driving so fast and tailgating the guy in front of you (this may or may not be my problem) and other things that could have helped you.
This is the misunderstood problem because most people would just blame the guy who stopped on yellow and not take any blame for themselves and become a better driver.
The Juggling Act
I touched on this one a bit already but I feel the juggling act is a problem in itself that should be talked about in more depth.
The juggling act is when you try to take everything from the order to your vehicle from the restaurant or when you take the order from you vehicle to the customer in one trip and you know the order is too big for you to do so.
If you imagined a 14 year old kid trying to bring 100 grocery bags in the house with his tiny little arms, you got the right idea.
So this can happen with smaller orders with more than 4 drinks, with large orders in general, order just awkwardly sized orders which can be annoying to carry because it is not balanced right.
What can you do? Not be afraid to take more than one trip... that's it. Nothing complicated, if you need to take more than one trip or have some containers ready like we spoke about, that's all you need to do.
Friendliness
The last metric you can be rated on by a customer is friendliness in how you interact with them.
This is probably the most challenging ones for some people because customers have a tendency to fun this through the filters in their own mind and that can affect how they perceive you as a person and thank God Doordash has a team for this specifically.
How many times I seen the unfair ratings number go up on a "leave at the door" delivery because someone had made a mention of my friendliness not being a 5 because they didn't interact with me personally is more than I can count.
Now an interaction with a customer on delivery is about a few seconds, so give a smile, have some enthusiasm and wish them a great day and that should be plenty.
If you are in communication with them mid-delivery and you are in the restaurant or en route to their location, tell them the status of the order, apologize for the inconvenience, tell them you will be there as soon as possible and thank them for their patience.
Most customers will be very forgiving for that alone, and those that aren't would be filed under unfair ratings anyway so it won't make any difference in the long term.
Can I Be Deactivated for Having a Poor Customer Rating?
So for this rating, because it has so much to do with the customer volume and retention of Doordash, this is something that you can be deactivated on.
If your rating falls below a 4.2, you can possibly be deactivated if you don't bring that up as quickly as possible.
That being said, it is significantly harder to get deactivated for this reason in modern day Doordash times for the amount of things that would deem an order to be unfair and how few orders actually apply to your ratings in the grand scheme of things.
So the last 100 deliveries that you have been rated on are what counts towards your current customer rating and that is always rolling and excluding unfair ratings.
So if you see your ratings drop and Doordash is deeming your poor ratings as justified and objective than you really are doing something wrong and it is vital that you identify what that is and fix it immediately!
Acceptance Rate
The acceptance rate is based on the last 100 delivery opportunities you have received and is on a rolling basis.
The more orders you accept the percentage will increase, and more you decline the percentage will decrease.
Using a percentage system and on a consistent rolling average you can get an idea of how many opportunities are coming your way and gauge the quality of the area you are in.
How is that? Allow me to explain.
Doordash has divided their locations into zones on a map of your area, and if you are in an area that people tend to tip you well, people who dash in that area are going to accept more orders, which means the acceptance rate should be much higher.
If you are in an area where tips are low or nonexistent, your acceptance rating will follow suit. So you can gauge the health of your area.
I think a relatively healthy area as far as Doordash zones are concerned is roughly 20%, because 80% of the tips are coming from 20% of the customers.
Can you be Deactivated for Having a Poor Acceptance Rating?
So despite the promotions and the highlights of people you see completing a very high volume of orders on a monthly basis, the short answer is no, you cannot be deactivated for poor acceptance rating.
As an independent contractor for Doordash, you have every right to say no to an order if you do not think it would be in your best interest to accept that order.
However, I will say the introduction of some of these benefit programs and milestone rewards, as well as the highlighting of people in their newsletter for accepting 900 deliveries a month is very misleading for those who are new to the platform.
So listen to me when I say AVOID THIS TRAP! You don't have to "earn your stripes" in the sense of you have to take bad orders for you and your vehicle just to make it through the "newbie stage."
You don't need to go out of your way to do orders that don't make sense for you to do because Top Dasher is that "valuable".
If you value it that highly you can take some lesser value orders at the end of every month just to maintain the status, but I don't do that anymore.
Completion Rate
The completion rate for Doordash is determined by a percentage system based on the last 100 deliveries that you accepted and is on a rolling basis.
The more deliveries that you accept and complete, the percentage will increase and the more deliveries you accept and don't complete for whatever reason, the percentage will decrease.
There are very few reasons I can think of that you would choose not to complete an order you accepted that don't categorize you under being a total jerk, but yeah there are reasons.
Extenuating circumstances for one, being car trouble or accident, family emergency and events of that affect.
Some people don't want to wait 30 minutes for an order so they will cancel it on their end and open up the opportunity for another dasher and make themselves available for another order. Personally wouldn't want to make a habit of this one.
Even road closures in an area that would be vital to getting to the certain locations at a decent time fall under this. Especially with contract violations in effect now, it would actually make sense for the safety of your account to cancel an order like this.
That is really the only reasons I can think of though, I am sure there are more but those are the common ones I have seen.
Can I be Deactivated for a Low Completion Rating?
You can absolutely be deactivated for a low completion rating! You are in danger of deactivation if your completion rating is less than 80%.
Which is why I don't like to make any kind of habit of accepting an order without completing it, even if the reason is good and it would make sense logically to cancel.
I have never once fell under a 95% completion rating in my career with Doordash.
On Time or Early Rate
The On-time or Early Rate is based on the percentage of last 100 orders you completed on-time, early, or less than 5 minutes late on a rolling basis.
The more punctual you are, the better this rate will be... or will it?
With my rating failing to move from 94% for over a year now and introduction to extreme lateness violations, it is hard to say how this metric truly operates at this point.
Will we see the end of this rating in the near future and replaced with something else in this wheelhouse? Maybe, maybe not. As of today, dashers need more clarity of how this will affect them in the future.
I will say as long as you are following the same guidelines of not getting extreme lateness contract violations, this metric is not something to be super worried about.
Number of Deliveries Completed
The number of completed deliveries is a total count of all orders that you completed during your lifetime as a Dasher.
With the introduction of milestone rewards and the potential they may or may not have in the future, it is not 100% certain what role this needs to play for the future of Doordash though I would not dismiss it.
I do believe that you should absolutely get this number as high as possible because you never know what value it can bring to you.
Pre-Claimed Drive Delivery Ratings
The Pre-claimed Drive Delivery Section is a ratings section on the ratings tab for the Doordash Drive platform specifically.
Doordash drive is an invite only section of Doordash where you can pre-claim large catering orders either that day or the night before and earn a lot per delivery.
Which is why some people don't see that on their ratings page, because you only see it once you complete a delivery.
Now one thing I want to make clear is that you cannot be deactivated for poor Doordash Drive ratings, but you can lose your ability to accept Drive opportunities for poor Drive Ratings.
That being said, I haven't found any articles on keeping a drive account active or any minimums for ratings so we are going to only talk about what these ratings are based off of.
With that said let's take a deep dive into these ratings and see the value of each of these towards maintaining the status of your Drive account.
Drive Completion Rating
The Drive Completion Rating is a percentage based on the last 20 orders you claimed on a rolling basis.
The more of these orders you complete the greater this number will be. However, orders only count against this metric are orders that are unassigned within the first 3 hours of the requested pick-up time.
So if you, for whatever reason change your mind 6 hours before the order, it would not count against you and the order will return to the drive menu.
Arrive to Store On-Time Rate
The arrive to store on-time rate is a percentage based on the last 20 orders you claimed and arrived to the store no more than 10 minutes early or late or on-time.
Yes you are penalized for being too early, this was my greatest frustration.
The more on-time you are, the higher the percentage... or is it?
If you are more than 10 minutes early to the store and you just don't swipe that you are there until the designated time, who is to say that you were too early?
But if you are prepared and arrive to the store early and swipe 11 minutes early, you are penalized, I get it is because you want the food to be hot, but seriously?
Anyway, not too much to worry about, just wish they could fix that mindset and part of the program. Don't be late to the store, you will be okay.
Arrive at Customer On-Time
The arrive at customer on-time rate is a percentage based on the last 20 drive deliveries you arrived to the customers location either on time or no more than 10 minutes earlier or later and on a rolling basis.
Because this is a catering order you will be expected to deliver the hot food at a very specific time and no sooner or later.
There is usually an on-time bonus as well so there is incentive to being punctual. Usually about $2 and that can add up quick if you are doing a lot of drive deliveries.
Number of Lifetime Drive Deliveries
This is the total number of drive deliveries that you completed over the lifetime of your career with Doordash Drive.
Pretty self explainatory, you want this number to be as high as possible to allow you to have early access to Drive deliveries.
Final Remarks
Ratings are an important part of Doordash, and with the introduction to contract violations I can understand to genuine concern with Doordash potentially deactivating them.
However, it was more likely in the past that people were getting deactivated from random events and there was never any sub-steps prior to contract violations.
Contract violations are definitely a step up as opposed to the purges people were doing in Doordash's history and they are making strides for people on all sides of Doordash to make a more positive experience for everyone.
With that said, thank you so much for taking the time to read this article! I hope you found some value and that you can apply and help you succeed in this gig economy!