GrubHub Nails Customer Retention

Last night I went to order some dinner off of the food delivery search engine GrubHub.

I was blown away by a UX feature that they utilize. Here it is:

I was asked to login in order to complete my order. Not sure of whether or not I had created a GrubHub account in the past I inputed an email/password combination that I commonly use.

Poof!

GrubHub alerts me that no password is associated with that email address, so a temporary one has been emailed to me.

So what just happened?

I’m rather certain that GrubHub automatically created an account for me when I typed in my email address. I had already told myself that I was not willing to go through the hassle of signing up for a new account. I would have much rather called the restaurant.

But since my account was automatically created for me I had no choice but to use the service. In other words, this feature worked. Lesson learned: even the tiniest UX feature can dramatically increase customer retention.