Uber is a global leader in mobility and delivery services, operating in over 10,000 cities across more than 69 countries. With innovative solutions like ride-sharing, food delivery, and freight logistics, Uber leads the industry in reshaping transportation and empowering local economies worldwide.
Over the years, Uber has forged a deep, strategic partnership with Chattermill to build a customer-centric culture powered by actionable insights. These insights have informed product innovations, enhanced the app experience, and driven business growth across the globe. What started as a localized initiative has since scaled to five global mega-regions, extending Uber’s CX capabilities on an enterprise scale.
This ongoing partnership has been integral in advancing Uber’s position as the global leader in mobility and delivery services, with a focus on delivering both localized and global insights to shape key business decisions:
- A 7-year strategic partnership driving customer experience innovation since 2018
- Scaled from a single region to 5 global mega-regions, expanding CX impact
- 400+ Uber users across CX, Operations, Product, and Support leveraging Chattermill insights
We spoke with Renata Vasconcellos de Sa, Head of Rider for EMEA, to explore how Uber scaled CX intelligence across five mega-regions and what has driven the continued success of this partnership with Chattermill.
How Uber and Chattermill Evolved From a Regional Initiative to a Global Partnership
Q: How would you describe your role at Uber and your key responsibilities within the organization?
Renata: I'm Renata, Head of Rider for EMEA in Central Operations at Uber. I've been with the company for five years, primarily in operations. In my role, I focus on driving rider growth, enhancing the rider experience, and increasing engagement.
Uber is a global leader in mobility and delivery, with over 150 million riders and 90 million drivers worldwide. I oversee operations across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, ensuring our services meet the diverse needs of millions of users every day.
Q: How did your relationship with Chattermill begin?
Renata: My relationship with Chattermill began when I joined Uber. Initially, it started as a focused NPS partnership, providing valuable insights into our consumer base. Over the past five years, Chattermill has evolved into a critical global partner, supporting us with data across both mobility and delivery, and covering all five mega-regions in which we operate.
Q: What led to scaling this partnership globally?
Renata: We partnered with Chattermill to adopt a more qualitative approach to understanding the consumer experience. While surveys provided valuable feedback, it was often too broad and open-ended, making it challenging to extract actionable insights. We needed a solution that could convert this qualitative data into clear, strategic direction for product development, feature enhancements, and service improvements.
When I joined Uber, I recognized the potential to integrate Chattermill’s insights with our internal data, creating a more impactful approach. This integration allowed us to prioritize key areas: addressing customer concerns to drive product improvements, as well as identifying customer preferences. Additionally, positive feedback reinforced our value proposition, emphasized our competitive strengths, and contributed to building better products for our users.
Q: Why was having a unified, global view of customer feedback so important?
Renata: While our support system effectively addresses major issues, it often only captures problems that require immediate attention. As a result, we were sometimes unaware of broader dissatisfaction, particularly regarding the smaller, day-to-day negative experiences that didn’t lead to support inquiries.
We needed a more comprehensive feedback layer to uncover these insights. Relying solely on occasional surveys wasn’t sufficient, as it lacked the qualitative, data-driven insights necessary to drive meaningful changes.
Chattermill bridged this gap by helping us identify issues that weren’t severe enough to prompt support requests but were still crucial for improving the customer experience. This allowed us to gather valuable feedback, understand customer concerns more deeply, and ultimately refine our products.
From Global Trends to Local Insights: Delivering CX Intelligence at Every Level
Q: What were the key factors in choosing a scalable solution that could support Uber’s global operations and diverse markets?
Renata: Chattermill stood out to us because of its ability to transform open-ended survey responses and NPS feedback into detailed, data-driven insights. It enables us to go beyond simply categorizing feedback by tone—positive or negative—and allows us to identify emerging themes. This is especially valuable in cases where a customer may provide a positive response but express dissatisfaction with a specific issue, such as a fee. Chattermill helps us identify such nuances, even when they don’t directly correlate with customer churn, such as feedback about cancellations or fees related to cancellations.
This additional layer of feedback complements our internal data, which, while useful, often lacks the broader context due to inherent biases from our in-depth knowledge of the products. As consumers of our own products, we have a skewed perception. Chattermill provides an external perspective on how our solutions are truly perceived by customers, which is why we continue to value and maintain our partnership with them.
Q: How do you leverage Chattermill’s insights in your daily operations?
Renata: There are two key ways we leverage Chattermill on a daily basis. First, we receive a monthly report that highlights two major trends: regional differences and variations within countries in my region. We often observe fluctuations in positive or negative feedback on specific aspects of our business. This allows us to assess whether these changes are occurring globally or are specific to certain regions, and how they impact each market.
This insight is essential, especially when we’re launching new solutions in specific regions. If we see positive feedback in one area, it’s a signal that we might consider expanding more quickly in other regions if we expect similar results. In our largest and most established markets, we continuously test new solutions. Chattermill helps us gather early consumer feedback, enabling us to make informed decisions on whether to accelerate initiatives or adjust our approach if the response isn’t as impactful as expected.
Q: Does Chattermill help you understand feedback at different stages of the customer journey?
Renata: As an operations-focused business, we're always concerned with what keeps consumers loyal to our brand and encourages continued engagement with our services. This varies significantly depending on where a customer is in their journey - whether they are new to the product, an early adopter, or a long-term user. It's easy to take for granted that customers have different experiences at each stage.
The more a consumer interacts with the product, the more they understand it, and the more likely they are to continue using it. In contrast, new users might feel confused or overwhelmed by something as basic as navigation, which we, as experienced users, might overlook.
To address this, we are segmenting customer feedback based on their journey stages and product usage. By understanding what drives satisfaction or dissatisfaction at each stage, we can build products that are tailored to meet specific needs.
Q: What specific features of Chattermill do you find most valuable in your analysis?
Renata: I find the Chattermill dashboards to be extremely valuable, particularly for its ability to provide both high-level trends and detailed insights. While the high-level reports are useful for identifying broader trends, the real magic happens when I can "double-click" on any anomaly or unexpected change to explore the details behind it.
For example, if I notice a sudden increase in discontent about pricing in Argentina, I can easily access and read the feedback to understand the tone and specifics of the complaints. This process is incredibly intuitive and efficient, which is a significant advantage over our internal systems and support tools.
Being able to quickly dive into the details and diagnoze issues at a granular level is not only impactful but truly enhances our ability to respond to and address concerns promptly.
Q: How do you ensure customer experience insights are effectively shared across your teams?
Renata: Our consumer experience analysts regularly analyze both internal data and feedback from Chattermill. We aggregate key findings to identify trends and insights, which are then shared with leadership on a monthly basis. This includes both positive and negative feedback, with a focus on addressing issues that need urgent attention. When needed, we also pull specific feedback examples to illustrate how customers are reacting to new features or changes.
Driving Experience-Led Growth: Scaling Uber’s CX Programs from Regional to Global
Q: How has Chattermill enabled you to scale product improvements by leveraging both global and localized customer insights?
Renata: Chattermill has been crucial in helping us understand the qualitative aspects of customer feedback, which has significantly impacted how we improve our product. For example, we previously struggled to pinpoint the exact reasons behind customer churn. Through Chattermill’s analysis, we uncovered key issues like pricing structures, payment options, and fee transparency that we wouldn't have easily identified with internal data alone.
By utilizing Chattermill’s insights, we were able to make informed decisions, such as launching new payment methods in specific countries and refining how riders and drivers interact when it comes to cash transactions. Additionally, customers expressed confusion over certain aspects of our product, which led us to simplify our communication, making it more transparent and accessible.
These actionable insights have allowed us to better align our offerings with customer expectations, leading to meaningful improvements in our product and customer satisfaction.
Q: Can you share an example of a global or localized insight from Chattermill that significantly influenced your strategy or decision-making?
Renata: One impactful example of how we used insights from Chattermill to introduce a new payment method was in Brazil. Initially, we offered two payment options: credit card payments through the app and cash in the car. At the time, we didn’t believe there was a need to offer more, given that the existing methods were relatively simple and effective. However, by analyzing Chattermill’s feedback, we noticed a consistent pattern where customers expressed a preference for an alternative payment method known as Pix, which was gaining popularity in Brazil.
This insight provided us with the evidence we needed to build a case for offering Pix as an additional payment option. Despite it being a specific request for one country, the demand was growing rapidly, and it became clear that integrating this payment method would improve customer satisfaction. As a result, we implemented it, and today Pix accounts for 30% to 70% of the total payments in Brazil - a significant shift that we directly attributed to the valuable insights gathered from Chattermill.
Q: That’s a remarkable outcome. It demonstrates how customer feedback is crucial for refining regional strategies.
Renata: Absolutely! Another example comes from when I was leading the Latin American market. We faced challenges in Argentina, where the market wasn’t performing as expected. By diving into the regional insights from Chattermill, we discovered that Argentine consumers had a strong preference for taxis, something we hadn’t offered.
Chattermill helped us understand these regional nuances. Once we introduced taxis to the platform, we saw a significant rise in our promoter score, improved reliability, and lower prices due to a larger pool of drivers. Using Chattermill’s insights allowed us to tailor our approach to local consumer needs, driving growth in Argentina.
Maximizing Return on Investment with an Enterprise-Grade Solution
Q: How do you assess the overall impact of Chattermill across various levels of your organization?
Renata: The impact of Chattermill is difficult to quantify because it varies across different levels of the organization. On a more localized, country-specific level, it can lead to small adjustments or the launch of targeted products, which may not have a global impact but can be highly significant regionally. However, its influence extends to larger, company-wide changes, such as improving how we communicate fees and cancellations to customers, which has a global application.
Chattermill plays a crucial role in shaping UX decisions, payment method launches, feature introductions, and even changes in how the app is presented. It’s impact permeates all levels of the company, helping us refine both small-scale and large-scale initiatives, making it a key driver in enhancing our overall product and user experience.
Q: What is the greatest value Chattermill provides in helping you scale and optimize customer experience strategies?
Renata: We’re essentially a data company with extensive information on user behaviors, like where they’re going and why, and how they behave over months, weeks, and years. But we don't always understand how they're feeling about it. When a user changes their behavior, it’s hard for us to correlate that with our internal data.
The biggest value Chattermill brings is helping us get closer to the consumer. As a large corporation, it’s easy to rely on high-level numbers and make assumptions. But without that deeper, more personal connection to the consumer’s feelings and experiences, it’s difficult to build something truly relevant to them.
Q: What would you say to someone hesitant about getting a service like Chattermill?
Renata: If someone is hesitant about adopting a service like Chattermill, I’d highlight two key points. First, it may indicate that your understanding of your customers isn’t as deep as it could be. It’s important to assess whether you truly have insight into your consumers' needs before continuing to build on that foundation. Chattermill provides valuable, actionable data that can really help you bridge that gap.
Secondly, attempting to gather meaningful insights without a comprehensive analytics system in place can lead to missed opportunities. It’s not enough to collect surface-level feedback; you need a platform that can delve deeper into the data. If you find a solution that offers this at the same level of effectiveness, I’d be interested to hear about it. But from my experience, Chattermill has proven to be an invaluable tool for driving smarter, more informed decisions.
Q: How do you assess the ROI of this relationship?
Renata: The ROI is very clear to us. We’re able to scale [customer feedback analysis] globally, which would be difficult even with an internal solution. It’s definitely worth it, and we see the return on investment on a monthly basis, making its value evident to us.
Enhancing Uber’s Growth Through an Expanded Partnership with Chattermill
Q: How do you see Chattermill evolving to support your decision-making as you expand and scale your customer experience initiatives globally?
Renata: I would definitely like to expand the usage of Chattermail, because I want us to get even smarter about reading that information and making faster decisions. More and more, we’re incorporating consumer feedback internally. It's easy to make assumptions based on our internal data, but now we need to prove that these assumptions align with what the consumer really wants and needs. It’s like having a new stakeholder at the table, confirming or challenging our strategy. I want to ensure that the insights we get are validating our approach, and that Chattermail becomes a mandatory step whenever we make decisions or shift priorities. Ultimately, this tool should help us refine our strategy and build something better.
Q: How has your partnership with Chattermill evolved over time?
Renata: Working with Chattermail has always been easy, even as a large service provider. Over time, our relationship evolved from a small, one-to-one interaction to a global one. What I value most is that whenever we needed changes or different insights, Chattermail was quick to adapt to our needs, tailoring the service to fit us rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution.
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