Few industries have seen such rapid growth as shared transport services over the past decade.
From E-scooter services like Lime to ride-hailing companies like Uber, billions of us now choose the sharing economy over private transportation.
Though we’ve seen 65% compound annual growth between 2015 and 2020 in ridesharing, customer loyalty continues to be a significant challenge. In most major cities today, customers have multiple options for getting from A to B, both in transport type and the provider.
The data tells its own story. Accenture research shows us that 52% of people in the US report having switched primary ride-hailing brands, and 41% intend to change primary ride-hailing brands in the next 12 months. This won’t come as a massive shock for anyone who lives in a city, which is a story in and of itself.
Our own analysis of over 800,000 pieces of public feedback, from the top five ridesharing companies, also shows that customer loyalty is declining at a rapid clip.
Given this, how can ridesharing companies fight off competition, maintain satisfaction, and build that ever-elusive customer loyalty?
The key is to improve customer experience. And the best way to achieve this? By developing a clearer understanding of customers’ individual needs and expectations and delivering experiences that meet both and exceed both.
To access this more precise understanding of our customers’ needs and expectations, we need Unified Customer Intelligence.
Let’s dive in.
What is Unified Customer Intelligence?
As the name suggests, Unified Customer Intelligence allows ridesharing brands to unify their customer data from customer feedback, conversation, and support channels and get the intelligence about their customers they need to make smarter CX decisions.
For example, you can integrate all of your Intercom, Trustpilot, and App Store review data, collectively analyse it at scale to understand what’s making your loyal customers stick with you, and learn why churned customers are leaving you for your competitors.
As a result, you can make changes to your customer experience that continues to delight loyal customers and pinpoint precisely where you need to improve to retain and win back disloyal customers.
Not only that, but you and your teams can isolate specific customer pain points across different locations, in different languages, and using different transport modes.
Ridesharing may be a global industry, but isolating pain points locally allows you to personalise your CX improvements to meet regional demands. After all, riders in New York and London, Johannesburg and Jakarta all want and expect very different things.
As you can see, there are many ways to utilise Unified Customer Intelligence. And there are numerous ways it has a positive impact on your business.
In addition to helping you better understand your customers and make positive changes to your customer experience, Unified Customer Intelligence saves you and your team time, effort, and resources.
No longer will you make time-consuming changes to your CX based on cold data or presumptuous intuition. Nor will your data teams have to spend weeks at a time trying to untangle the complex web of customer data.
With Unified Customer Intelligence, you can adjust your CX strategy based on what your customers are actually telling you. You can do it at scale. And you can do it in the time it takes to order an Uber, Lyft, or Lime.
Why Customer Experience In Ridesharing Is So Important
With 52% of people switching primary ride-hailing brands, ridesharing brands have a customer loyalty issue. That much is clear. So what can brands in the sector do to solve it?
The data is clear. We need to focus on improving the customer experience.
There’s a good reason for this. There are very few ways ridesharing companies can compete beyond delivering experiences that delight customers.
Competing on price may work in the short term if you’re looking to edge out dominant players. Still, once special offers and discounted rides run out, customers will always choose the brand with the best, frictionless, and personalised experience. And in today’s driver-short economy, you’ll struggle to get the number of drivers needed to maintain quality of service.
Likewise, there’s only so much you can do to improve rider availability when drivers have every single app installed on their phones in most cities.
With high competition in almost every city today, the only thing you can really compete on is by understanding what your customers think and making marginal gains based on this information. And the only way to do that at the scale needed for any customer-centric ridesharing brand is to take the Unified Customer Intelligence approach.
Improving Rider Experiences with Chattermill
Improving rider experiences can be challenging. Customers just expect so much nowadays, don’t they? Rides in minutes. Heavily discounted journeys. Seamless customer support.
That’s why you need to pinpoint precisely which changes you need to make that will lead to more delighted customers and fewer customers using your competitors’ services. And the only way to do that is by listening to your customers themselves and finding the sentiment behind what they are telling you.
Customers might have pain points that you might never spot without Unified Customer Intelligence. Negative and positive trends can often lay hidden in plain sight, whether related to price, safety, or availability. To uncover them, you need a platform like Chattermill.
Because at some point, beyond brand recognition and price, optimising your customer experience to match customer needs based on an in-depth understanding of their feedback and interactions is the only way you can sustainably differentiate yourself from your closest rivals.
Improving Driver Experiences with Chattermill
Ridesharing companies are unique in that many have to compete not only for riders but also for drivers.
And every ridesharing company currently has a driver shortage problem.
This two-sided approach to customer experience can cause challenges for CX teams in these brands. But delivering exceptional experiences for drivers is arguably just as essential as delighting end-users. Especially if you want to keep drivers using your app.
The reason? Drivers are equally (if not more) disloyal to ridesharing companies as customers are, especially in cities where multiple options are openly available.
Again, the key to ensuring drivers choose your services over your competitors is understanding what drives loyalty – beyond the simple basics of price. You need to listen to their feedback across every interaction customers have with your brand to do so.
Chattermill might tell you several things. That new feature you introduced to the app? It could be harming experiences for drivers. Those loss-leading perks you’ve promoted? They might be having little-to-no impact.
Whatever Chattermill’s Unified Customer Intelligence is telling you, you need to heed it. Otherwise, you’ll lose drivers faster than it takes to hail a ride.
Driving Growth with Unified Customer Intelligence
If improving the customer experience is top-of-mind for you, and let’s face it, it should be, understanding what drives delight and disloyalty amongst your customer base is the best place to start. And don’t forget to make sure you’re integrating all of your customer data and apps with your Unified Customer Intelligence tool.
It’s critically important that you have all of your data flowing into Unified Customer Intelligence to help you get a complete picture of who your customers are, what they want, and what drives them to stick with you. That way, you can base CX decisions on the entire customer reality.
And if you’re looking to learn more about customer experience in ridesharing, I’ve got you covered. Read my recent post for more intel on Why Customer Experience is Key to Success in the Ride-sharing Wars.
Happy riding reading!
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