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COVID-19 as a Double-edged Sword: The Perfect Opportunity for GrabFood to Optimize Its Performance

This research underscores the critical role COVID-19 plays in potentially sharpening the resilience of GrabFood company to its greatest degree. As a temporary double-edged sword, it could optimize the performance and customer satisfaction of GrabFood in the long run. Our findings revolve around anecdotal evidence of issues that, if altered, could help its loyal customers and gain new ones in such a sensitive era. To address the challenges that restrict GrabFood from transforming into a more flexible online platform, an online survey was carried out with both GrabFood customers and employees. The study's findings indicated that GrabFood is gaining its popularity during the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. The post-pandemic arising obstacles will be further stressed, and solutions will be suggested based on secondary data collected from observations of other high-performance level companies like Foodpanda.


INTRODUCTION
Ever since the COVID-19 gave birth to an unexpected financial crisis, companies had to halt their plans and start planning strategies to survive within the fluctuating economy. Even though supermarkets have seen an enormous demand for food supplies, restaurants and cafes had no choice but to shut down their business, and many starting SMEs are at risk of permanent closure with countless employees losing their jobs. The COVID-19 aftermath on food industries compelled Leon, a UK fast-food chain, to alter its business model; 65 of its restaurants became shops that sell refrigerated ready-meal type plastic pouches (Jack, 2020). Furthermore, just like Leon, the pandemic became an undeniable agony for countless businesses.
One impact it printed on the economy is that it had become the starting engine for many online platform opportunities. In which restaurants were forced to close and had to utilize alternative channels to reach their customers and maintain their status (Raj, Sundararajan, & You, 2020). Only through online delivery offering services was that possible.
In Malaysia, many companies recognized the impact of COVID-19 on citizens' daily lives. Grab's introduction to Malaysia has caused economic improvement in the country, in which the unemployment fell through Grab's plenty job vacancies (Widyatama et al., 2020). Thus, in an attempt to counter that impact, popular companies like Grab had to shift their employees from the most damaged sector Grab-Drive to one of its surviving online delivery subsidiaries like GrabFood due to the decreasing customer demand in transportation.
Even though the COVID-19 presented itself as an obstacle for many services and companies, it surprisingly proved to be a double-edged sword for most online gig companies like Uber and Grab. While profits and revenue declined from the transportation sector, the highest level of performance was recorded in the food delivery sectors of such companies. In fact, the synchronous existence of a subsidiary within such big companies made the most significant difference between survival and shutdown. In Grab's case, accentuating certain aspects and improving the food sector will only turn the main objective of the company from survival mode to ready-to-optimize mood. This is evident through the observation that dine-in options became idle, subsequently shifting demand towards the online channel; variability in the availability of groceries and fears of going to a grocery store may also induce consumers to order in rather than cook themselves .
Building on such work, we analysed and documented the sustaining effects of food delivery platforms in the months following the shutdown in Malaysia due to the pandemic. According to a study done by Rakuten Insight in Malaysia (Statista, 2020a), a staggering number of citizens are using online food delivery apps way more often than they did before the COVID-19, in which 63 percent of the female respondents and 70 percent of the male respondents declared that they only increased their usage of online food delivery during the pandemic. The justification was that dining out became their last due to the MCO measures and fear of the pandemic. To add more to the restrictions as a reason, multiple respondents have admitted that cooking was also a struggle because they feared going out to crowded grocery shops for supplies and eventually not cooking. Consequently, making services like GrabFood and Foodpanda is the only salvation in Malaysia during such rough times.
Our research highlights how replenishing certain aspects of the app is the right choice in a situation that created a significant market opportunity to win the hearts of clients and gain a competitive advantage over companies like Foodpanda, a service that has preceding implemented specific strategies to take advantage of the situation, and that was evident through primary data collected mentioned in the results and discussion. If GrabFood eliminates the problems and issues examined in this research, it will achieve the customer satisfaction it needs.
The research focus on the COVID-19 positive impact on GrabFood stems from the major customer behavioural shift this sensitive age of time is causing as well, in which most people have shifted their trust and usage to online service platforms more, and in turn, are expecting what they need. Azizul et al. (2019) studied the relationship between different variables to customers. Trustworthiness recorded the highest results of respondents to such food delivery services. Our findings show how only through eliminating some specific problems GrabFood is facing will it be able to operate at its fullest potential and gain the full advantage it needs from the COVID-19 as a food online delivery subsidiary.
Grab is one of the most popular brands in Southeast Asia. Adam et al. (2020) tested people's awareness of Grab recently, showing 80% of individuals were said to have Grab mobile app installed in their phone. Some citizens even depended on such services as a source of living. According to research conducted on Grab's official website, 6000 employees were recorded to be working under Grab company, and a staggering 710,000 have partnered with Grab-Drive as their gig job. The same journal paper observing Grab's popularity amongst people also found out that there are more customers satisfied with the services compared to the ones that are not. In which, the highest rate recorded a satisfactory level of 32 people out of 60 (Adam et al., 2020).
With all this information depicting the COVID-19 as the culprit of many lost jobs, our research unexpectedly shows how the emergence of COVID-19 issues only further accentuated people's dependence on Grab one way or another. The former is through the shift of employees to the GrabFood sector as discussed before and the latter through customers' dependence on GrabFood as a salvation source, one that helps them avoid the horrors of having to go through crowded unknown bodies and risking their exposure to the disease merely to buy a couple of daily groceries or get their favourite meal from McDonald's.
In a paper studying the factors determining customers' continuity in using online food delivery apps, Zhao and Bacao (2020) had admitted that the COVID-19 significantly had a negative influence on the supply and demand of the catering industry. However, they also argued that this effect only caused the emergence of another change, in which the consumption habits of residents had caused these catering enterprises to transform from traditional in-store service into online-to-offline service for the sake of surviving.  explained the positive impact the pandemic had on digital platforms like food delivery services. They used Uber as their model of the study titled "COVID-19 and Digital Resilience: Evidence from Uber Eats.
The growing body of past literature explains how food on delivery services are needed the most during the COVID-19 and how traditional platforms have changed to onlinedigital ones. (Nicola et al., 2020;Raj et al., 2020;Zhao & Bacao, 2020). However, much less attention has been given to how food on delivery platforms is now put on the spot by humanity as a necessity rather than an option. Only through GrabFood improvement can Grab both benefit itself, the rest of Malaysia employees, and customers. Grab can ultimately prove itself worthy of the role it was subconsciously assigned to as an online food delivery owning company by eliminating specific problems that might have pushed the influx of potentially loyal customers and the wave of new ones away.
Since Grab is one of the top service companies in Southeast Asia, the challenges faced by Grab is related to the customers' satisfaction, in which improving certain strategies gives it lots of advantages (Ezzatul, Kee, Tuovi, Roslan, & Charlotte, 2019). The COVID-19 could be used as a tool for Grab to ultimately sharpen its resilience to any future crisis. Here we highlight the obstacles preventing Grab from getting loyal customers and taking full advantage of the COVID-19. Further, by exploring the problems preventing GrabFood from optimizing its performance, we add to a body of literature that explores suggestions it can adopt to fix them.

RESEARCH METHOD
In this research, we have applied a mixture of secondary and primary data within the framework of the quantitative method. A google questionnaire form was conducted and distributed to two targeted categories. Hence, two versions of the survey were created to get different points of views for our paper. One was for the customers and the other was for GrabFood employees. The surveys we made served as backed up confirmation to the secondary information we got from Grab's website, Facebook and, not to mention, the polls of previous research papers we read. Social-networking systems were the main source for our customer satisfaction secondary data, while Grab's official website was the source for the employee's secondary data.
The customers' responses were collected from friends, family members, outsiders and foreigners. We shared the google document link with them via WhatsApp and we are thankful to them for helping us fill up the survey. The customer's survey was conducted online to ensure safety. We have chosen this way due to COVID-19 regulations. Faceto-face interactions should be limited so as to be on the safe side. We thought that the online survey was the best way to collect data. The employee's responses were gotten from GrabFood employees working in Selangor, in which a teammate's friend working in Grab sent the survey link via a Whatsapp group dedicated to the employees. Real-time interactions were also vital, so a small portion of our findings were taken through repeated attempts of interviewing couriers whenever any of our teammates ordered something from GrabFood. We ensured to follow all safety precautions like wearing a mask and maintaining a 1-meter distance while meeting them.
The content of the first survey is about customers' satisfaction with GrabFood services. The results were measured through the number of positive responses to questions regarding how GrabFood is presenting its services online and offline during the COVID-19 pandemic. The customer responses with a positive feedback were collected and calculated through the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). The second Survey content was about the three organizational behaviour individual mechanisms that fuel the individual outcomes like job performance. GrabFood employees' job satisfaction, motivation and stress was the target of our study in this paper. This is due to the correlation between the issues customers face with GrabFood and the level of the employees' (couriers') job performance. Only through studying both versions can we come up with the findings we need and give suggestions to whatever obstacle emerged.
It took us about three weeks to complete this survey and reach out to as many respondents as possible. A total of 100 respondents were collected for customer satisfaction and 25 employees for job performance and satisfaction with GrabFood.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The area of information already acknowledged was that the COVID-19 is currently a pinpoint for delivery services, and to use it as a drive to success or because of its failure is up to the firm technique of handling the situation. However, the research's unfilled gap was whether Grab is taking advantage of that point, what methods it has been implementing to adapt, and whether certain technical issues in the firm are hindering its success during this pandemic.
Through a poll of carefully conducted research methods, we managed to fill the research gaps and came up with results for our main topic and analysed problems GrabFood is struggling with, mainly through observing customers' responses. We concluded by highlighting the areas GrabFood needed for improvement. Although employees and other factors serve an important role in measuring a company's performance, customers play the main character in determining whether a business will gain profit or lose it. Therefore, such a segment will constitute many of our findings here and will be repeated when analysing how GrabFood performance is doing and how it is set back, especially since GrabFood success depends on proving itself worthy to the customers in such a sensitive time like the COVID-19.

Is communication between you and customers convenient?
Yes 25 100.0 No 0 0 Table 1 shows GrabFood Employees' demographics profile. As we can see from the above table, it is stated that among 25 employees, 20 of them are males and 5 employees are females, which consist of 80% and 20% respectively. According to the survey, male employees are four times more than female employees. Most of the Grab employee's ages range between 28 and above, which means 68% of respondents followed by the age group 23 -27 and 18 -22 where both groups of age consist of 4 respondents, each contributing to 16% of the survey. Based on Grab employees' service, as we expected, the number of GrabFood employees recorded the highest number (88%). In a nutshell, we can predict that most of the respondents are male in the age group of 28 and above working as GrabFood couriers.
To understand how employees job performance is a factor that affects the level of customer satisfaction and is a potential tool to improve GrabFood's performance during the pandemic, it is important to keep in mind that there is a strong correlation between the three organizational behaviour mechanisms mentioned in Colquitt's organizational behaviour book (Colquitt, LePine, & Wesson, 2017) and one of its individual outcomes is job performance. Job performance is defined as the set of employee acts that lead, either positively or negatively, to an organizational goal accomplishment (Colquitt et al., 2017). In several research, these sets of acts are known to be affected mainly by stress, motivation, and job satisfaction. Through this concept, we asked employees several questions to measure their level of stress, motivation, and job satisfaction within GrabFood's work environment, and whether they are affected by the current pandemic. Consequently, knowing their responses gives us a clearer picture of whether such mechanisms are causing the employees to develop low or high job performance, significantly affecting customer satisfaction with GrabFoods services. This is where the survey we conducted to GrabFood's couriers starts to connect the dots in this research, in which the table above illustrates research evidence that backs up our conceptual argument. When asked whether the communication between the employees and customers is convenient, no respondents recorded a no. All respondents (100%) claimed that the communication was easy to prove that these couriers are both the first customers' encounter and the mediator between clients and GrabFood. This insinuates that their strong connection plays a major part in deciding whether the customer will receive a good experience or not. In short, the employee's job performance will affect how they treat the customer directly and the lack of the three individual mechanisms might contribute to customers' dissatisfaction and business.
Of the 25 courier respondents, 11 (44%) stated that they experienced stress working at Grab, and 14 of them (56%) claimed that they did not. When asked about their stress, the majority who responded yes complained about the lack of income while the rest admitted that achieving the expected delivery time caused them to feel anxious. The current COVID-19 situation was another minor reason as well considering that 10 respondents (40%) stated that they felt unsafe working under GrabFood. In the same survey, 14 respondents claimed they feel motivated working under Grab while 11 respondents stated they do not.
Despite the existence of variation between responses in favour of Grab and those that are not, GrabFood has made a significant amount of contribution to ensure that its employees feel safe, motivated, and less stressed. This is proven when you look at the small-scale difference between the no respondents and the yes respondents. If Grab were to be having an issue regarding their employees, the numbers would speak for itself and record a huge number of responses indicating the low level of job performance. Our secondary data shows that GrabFood has ensured that it will not deteriorate any further during the COVID-19 through a couple of implementations. The first is that they conducted a scheme called "SOCSO." It aimed to compensate the couriers exposed to COVID-19 sickness with money. Another was by urging its employees always to wear masks.
Nonetheless, we still cannot disregard the other half of employees claiming that they are stressed, demotivated, and untranquil. After all, their job performance will be affected negatively, resulting in a low score of customer satisfaction and assuredly defeat the purpose of GrabFood taking advantage of the COVID-19 situation as a food delivery service. In light of this, our research will discuss suggestions for GrabFood to improve its worker's environment in the conclusion section. The minimum top-up of RM20 would be better 68 68.0 I don't mind this decision, and it's not affecting me at all 32 32.0 Table 2 shows GrabFood customers' demographics profile. Over half of the respondents (67%) were females. Female respondents are two times more than male customers. Most respondents are at the age of 18-22 which means 63% of respondents followed by 23 -27 with 25%, and 28 and above with 12%. Based on the nationality of GrabFood customers, 88 respondents are local which contributes to 88% of the nationalities, while the other 12 are from Yemen, Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, and Jordan contributing to 12%. Besides that, GrabFood is popular among Grab customers where 84% of respondents prefer that service while 16% of respondents use GrabCar many times. Considering that the survey was conducted during the COVID-19, it is not surprising that GrabFood service became much more used than Grabcar. To put it succinctly, we can predict that most of the respondents were females in the age group of 18 -22 who are locals and began using GrabFood much more repeatedly.
Customer satisfaction is undeniably a key to a company's success; hence it is the research pinpoint to depict how GrabFood could take advantage of the pandemic situation. With its food delivery apps gaining significant popularity in such a sensitive time, much pressure is put on such services as well. In which, one recent study done by Rakuten Insight (Statista, 2020a) in Malaysia accentuates that fact. It stated that 58% of the respondents ordered food from FoodPanda delivery more often during the pandemic than they did before. Countless secondary data was also researched and piled up together to conclude that food delivery apps are lately utilized more frequently.
This all brings us to the point that customers would tend to react more towards food delivery apps considering that they started to completely depend on such an online platform. With the right amount of trustworthiness, convenient usage, and correct strategies, any food delivery app can take advantage of the customer's involvement in the service. To do that, GrabFood has to tackle the issues that the new and existing customers are not so fond of first. Examples are stated in the primary data collection of the survey mentioned in Table 4 below. These questions were picked based on secondary data collected from GrabFood official Facebook customer reviews, in which it was observed that many customers would state similar concerns repeatedly. In order to back the data up, we recorded those issues and forwarded them to our survey respondents. The results we got were highly similar to the secondary data we got from Facebook.
Since many customers complained about Grab's customer service, we asked the respondents whether they think the customer service is helpful. A total of 40% of the respondents stated that the service needs improvement, while the rest of the 48% said it was excellent. Only a mere number of respondents said they are unreachable. This gets us to the point that Grab should monitor its customer service employees to satisfy the customers. They could use the employee's satisfaction table we analysed earlier to figure out why they have such job performance. Hence, this question clearly stresses the relationship between employees and customers.
Another controversial issue during our Facebook analysis was whether customers felt safe using their online payment and whether they preferred cash on delivery. Since those customer reviews did not represent all the customers, we asked the respondents whether instilling cash on delivery (COD) method payment would be convenient considering that a lot of people do not feel safe using online payment. Despite different variations of response, 69% of the respondents showed that they favoured the COD method. Only 41% percent had no problem using online payment. Putting the COD will not only make GrabFOOD catch up with other competitors like FoodPanda, it will also help avoid cash refund issues and payment cancellation. The question we asked confirmed the customers' willingness to use COD, in which 93 respondents stated that the option of adding (COD) in GrabFood payment methods would be good.
The last most common issue was Grab's new decision regarding the increase of the minimum top-up from 20 RM to 50 RM. Even though such a decision does not seem like a big issue at first glance, it can still trigger subliminal adversity in customers' loyalty and satisfaction. The first would be decreasing its trustworthiness to customers, such a sudden decision implemented during the COVID-19 could give the impression that GrabFood is not attempting to make the economic situation less horrible. What makes it even worse, the customers would feel constricted. According to a survey conducted by Rakuten Insight in Malaysia (Statista, 2020b) targeting the minor segment of customers that stopped using food delivery apps, 43% of the respondents said the reason why they used food delivery food apps less was that they had been affected by the economic impact. The 50 RM top-up decision implemented might neither worsen customers' satisfaction, nor cause it to improve either. Such perfect timing should be used as a chance for GrabFood to offer discounts and strategies that show customers how much it is willing to contribute during the COVID-19 situation and gain loyal customers, not the opposite. CSAT is usually conducted on a scale basis of 1 to 5 measuring the amount of customers' satisfaction with the services provided by a certain company. However, this research used the questions already conducted in table 4 instead, weighted out a logical amount of positive to negative responses, and came up with the percentage of positive responses, in which it amounted to 38.2%. Since such a survey does not directly ask the customers if they are completely satisfied with GrabFood service, it does not serve as a fair valid score. However, we did not conduct the scale methodology due to its generality and ambiguity, in which customers would not know what exactly do we mean by "satisfaction". Therefore, weighing out the results through the questions done earlier would narrow down the results and give us details on which aspects precisely customers are satisfied with (through the percentage of positive responses) or have a problem with (through the negative responses). It also helps GrabFood figure out how such issues mentioned contributed to the negative responses and impacted the positive ones. Food Panda is the perfect example or depiction of how a food delivery app can utilize the current pandemic situation and gain popularity. Based on the surveys conducted during the COVID-19 situation, Table 4 serves as proof that FoodPanda has gained huge recognition compared to Grab food. In which, 27% of the respondents preferred GrabFood over Food Panda, and the rest of the 73% of respondents opted for the latter. When further observation was made regarding this effect, we found a strong relationship with the price. According to the table, Food panda was chosen mostly due to its cheapness and convenience. Other minor reasons could be the frequency of discounts and the availability of the Cash on Delivery option. If such research were to be done before the COVID-19 lots of results would have been different. Since many individuals, however, had been affected economically, it is extremely normal for a person to pick the cheaper and most convenient of the two options. Consequently, it brings us back to the same point as to how the pandemic had majorly affected the course and direction of many results that could have been different otherwise. Hence, why GrabFood should take this into consideration and act now.
In this paper, we provide several recommendations for GrabFood to optimize its performance. First, GrabFood may consider drone delivery. The use of drones was considered back in 2019 to facilitate food delivery. Despite the idea being interesting, not many services or companies implemented it or considered it. The reason was that it sounded rather impractical and against the norm for a while. Now that the pandemic has hit, all the norms have changed, and we must adapt to different sets of regulations. Furthermore, we are in a time where we need to minimize social interactions as much as possible, so the notion of food services using artificial intelligence to deliver the food will allow the customer to feel safer and less exposed to the pandemic. Certain services like uber had already started "Uber Air" initiative way back, so GrabFood can also consider such an initiative as well. If the pandemic were to last longer than a year, such a method might need to be implemented sooner than later.
Second, GrabFood should add another option in the drivers/courier's ratings regarding wearing a mask. Our Facebook analysis has shown lots of complaints about employees not wearing face masks when meeting up with customers. Such protests could be easily disregarded considering the absence of verification of regular face-mask wear. If no program existed to penalize employees who do not wear a face mask, the problem would be magnified. To tackle such an issue, GrabFood can pick one of two options. The safer and cheaper method would be adding another option in the rating section, "Driver or courier is not wearing a mask." Such a way motivates and encourages employees to wear a face mask.
Third, a Real-time ID check is the second option to help urge employees to wear a face mask. It is a method first used by Uber. The app attempts to detect the presence of a mask by scanning the face. This method was first used to find out if the drivers and couriers are wearing masks but then the service decided to urge riders and customers as well. GrabFood can also implement such a method into their system. This way they will address the problems regarding employees feeling unsafe, anxious or stressed. Finally, GrabFood can create a more convenient platform in the mobile app during the pandemic. This includes decreasing the top-up from RM50 back to RM20, improving the customer service, and instilling a COD (cash on delivery) option.

CONCLUSIONS
Recent studies by Rakuten insight (Statista, 2020b) show that approximately 80% of the respondents aged between 35 and 44 years old stated that they would continue ordering food delivered as often as before even if restaurants and dining establishments are open and MCO (Movement Control Order) measures were to be lifted. Food delivery services like FoodPanda that gained a significant number of customers and success during the COVID-19 will not lose them once the pandemic is over. In other words, it would be getting permanent positive results through improvement of GrabFood services during the pandemic. When other food delivery services were to have given up to the pandemic situation, its deterioration would also be permanent, and the damage would be long lasting even after the pandemic is over.
Even though Elvandari, Sukartiko, & Nugrahini (2018) found that food quality, delivery quality and costs are the three main attributes affecting the intention of using food delivery apps. Cho, Bonn, and Li (2019) found out that trustworthiness has the most positive effect on perceived value towards formulating user's attitudes to continue using food delivery services, hence this pandemic is the best timing. GrabFood can show customers how reliable and ethical it is through eliminating any issues that would spark doubt and negativity to customer satisfaction, as well as taking care of the employees' job satisfaction and motivation to increase their job performance.
Thereby, if GrabFood wanted to avoid the latter scenario, it should take the issues mentioned in this research into consideration, take some suggestions and use the pandemic as a double-edged sword to climb the staircase of permanent success. Food delivery apps have never gained so much attention before and probably will not do so in the future, thus opting to take the timing now to improve is the best decision any food delivery app would make.