Instacart’s Story
Learn how Instacart's strategic step to upgrading its community and adopting Khoros' next-generation communities platform helped drive tangible results.
Summary
Instacart, a leading online grocery platform in the U.S., is committed to reshaping how people shop for groceries. Instacart's mission is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together.
Instacart’s Shop Talk community was originally established in 2018 with the goal of providing shoppers with a place to connect, and for teams at Instacart to interact with shoppers and gather their feedback. In 2023, they decided to take the strategic step to upgrade from the classic version to the next generation of Khoros Communities to foster a stronger sense of belonging among community members, enhance their feedback mechanisms to enable gathering and implementing shopper insights more efficiently, and making tangible impacts on shopper experiences and contributions.
COMMUNITY SCALE
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33 %
increase in page views (2024)
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5 %
uplift in page views per visitor (2024)
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105 %
YoY increase in registered users (2022)
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310 k
users (2022)
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217 %
YoY increase in completed registrations (2021)
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
Cost savings in technical resources stemming from the next generation of Khoros Communities' improved site usability has reduced the need for extensive engineering and design support.
Improved shopper quality has resulted from shoppers’ newfound ability to find educational content more easily, leading to reduced costs associated with operational inefficiencies and customer satisfaction measures.
“The Khoros Communities solution offered advanced customization capabilities that aligned seamlessly with our brand identity, allowing us to maintain a consistent and recognizable platform experience.”
— Annabel Becerra-Chavez, Sr. Program Manager at Instacart
About Instacart
The leading grocery technology company in North America, Instacart works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 85,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for approximately 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders on their own flexible schedule.
Rationale for change / Business use case
Through the years, Instacart’s community has effectively bridged the communication gap between shoppers and internal teams, ensuring that their feedback directly influences operational and product strategies. Recently, Instacart evolved their goals and vision for the community to transform it into a vibrant, informative hub where shoppers feel their voices are not only heard, but are integral to shaping our community and business strategies.
Due to challenges faced from limitations within the team's ability to receive engineering and design support, Instacart’s Community team sought out a solution. Recognizing the opportunity to enhance both the usability and aesthetics of their community, the team decided to upgrade from the classic version of Khoros Communities to its next generation Aurora version.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“Leveraging the innovative features of Next Generation Khoros Communities like Ideas & Events, their plug-and-play UI, and the enhanced ability to make changes to community settings easily has been transformative.”
Annabel Becerra-Chavez
Sr. Program Manager at Instacart
"Working with Khoros has been greatly facilitated by their responsiveness and support. The team’s ability to swiftly escalate issues and present potential solutions has been critical in addressing challenges efficiently. Moreover, the easy-to-use interface and proactive onboarding guidance helped our team transition smoothly to the Next Generation Khoros Communities, empowering us to enhance our community’s functionality and engagement without lengthy delays or resource constraints."
Annabel Becerra-Chavez
Sr. Program Manager at Instacart
COMMUNITY JOURNEY
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Inception
Inception
Instacart’s Shop Talk community was initially launched in 2018. The team realized the opportunity to better understand the needs of their shopper community. Rather than just engaging on social media or asking for shopper feedback via surveys, Instacart strived to develop a space where internal teams could truly connect with and learn from shoppers. They set out to create a space for shoppers to engage with one another to help build a sense of belonging and camaraderie amongst peers.
From 2021 to 2022, the Community team partnered with their product, research, and regional operations teams to understand how the community could help them meet their team goals. They utilized the community to conduct focused deep dives for their product teams so they could quickly iterate on features, better understand shopper experience, and make platform improvements. In addition, the team deployed Accelerated Community Management (ACM) and partnered with their Social Care team to provide a more consistent presence within the community and better support shoppers.
Technology: Instacart chose to migrate their community to Khoros Communities, Classic version in 2019. They incorporated gamification, ideas, Q&A, and knowledge base engagement features to help build a space where members can ask questions, get answers, and share the best tips and tricks. In 2022, Instacart added contests and events features as well as Khoros Care.
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Growth
Growth
In 2023, Instacart upgraded from Khoros Communities, Classic version to Next Generation Khoros Communities to take advantage of its simplified and intuitive user interface. The team also launched a comprehensive redesign of the Shop Talk UI/UX, aiming to dramatically elevate the overall shopper experience.
Technology: By upgrading to Next Generation Khoros Communities, Instacart was able to transform their community by leveraging features like Ideas and Events, plug-and-play UI, and the enhanced ability to easily make changes to community settings.
Lessons learned
Outline clear goals
Outline clear goals
Approaching a project like a community software upgrade is no easy feat without clearly defined goals and projected outcomes. Instacart knew that in order to improve shopper experience on the platform, they needed to focus on creating a community that meets their needs now and in the future. Their goals included:
- Simplify shopper experience.Instacart wanted to minimize the effort shoppers need to take to reach their desirable action and maximize the reward.
- Design for scale. They set out to keep all unique users in mind (both shoppers and partners) as well as consider the potential updates that might be coming later on.
- Prioritize by popularity. The team set out to focus on displaying the right information that would be the most impactful to users.
Prioritize UI/UX
Prioritize UI/UX
Receiving feedback from shoppers expressing frustration with their previous community’s lack of user-friendly features lit a fire within the Instacart Community team. They realized that the upgrade to Next Generation Khoros Communities would need to focus on:
- Enhancing navigation and usability of the Shop Talk community to boost engagement. Instacart updated the menu to match the webview navigation bar, adding an orange “link highlight” for enhanced user clarity.
- Improving information presentation to support ease of use by members. This work included streamlining menu categories by reducing them from 15 to 6 distinct sections for ease of exploration, and implementing clearer CTAs and tagging for easier information discovery. Additionally, the team improved naming conventions to better help shoppers quickly understand the purpose of each category.
- Developing a strategy to continually upgrade the community to meet program and user needs.
Results
Post-upgrade, Instacart has observed transformative outcomes, including enhanced feedback mechanisms and improved methods of gathering shopper insights, all to efficiently and tangibly impact user experience.
Increased user engagement
Enhanced user experience
Improved cost efficiency
Improved shopper quality
Why Khoros Community software
The Khoros-powered Instacart Community provides shoppers with a place to connect, and for teams at Instacart to interact with shoppers and gather their feedback. The company highly values the Khoros Communities platform for:
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Simpler, faster, more powerful experience
The Next Generation Khoros Communities brings new automation, AI-orchestration, and no-code tools that simplify community design, management, and measurement while laying the foundation for integration with emerging technologies like generative AI.
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User-friendly site design
Instacart can design a brand-approved community without custom code. The brand is able to leverage expert-created templates and a simple, drag-and-drop interface to customize page layouts, navigation, brand themes and more.
Unlock Community Success
Instacart drove tangible results with Khoros’ next-gen platform. See how it can work for you — book a demo today.