An analysis of a third-party food delivery app during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose The study aims to analyze guest comments on the Uber Eats food delivery app (FDA) in the USA during the April-June 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period. Three aspects influencing customer satisfaction with the FDA were evaluated in this study: (1) performance on the app, (2) product quality and (3) service quality. Design/methodology/approach One thousand customer comments posted on the Uber Eats Google Play app from April 1 to June 30, 2020 were analyzed in this study. The text mining technique was applied to discover the hidden, but meaningful patterns from the unstructured text. Content analysis was applied to systematically analyze the text into organized categories and themes. Findings Among the three dimensions evaluated in this study, the most important dimension regarding customers' perceptions toward the FDA was the service quality dimension (40.02%), followed by the FDA's performance dimension (39.43%) and the product quality dimension (20.54%) was least important. Additionally, customers' perceptions towards the three dimensions were all unfavorable and there were more negative comments than the positive comments: FDAs (P/N = 0.728), product quality (P/N = 0.60) and service quality (P/N = 0.865). Originality/value Previous studies investigating FDAs assessed solely the performance of the app. However, customers' experience of a food delivery service is comprised of multiple components including the app, the restaurant and the delivery driver. To fill the void, this study evaluated a third-party app performance, product quality and service quality to capture the totality of customers' food delivery service experience.