How Uber, Yandex.Taxi and Blablacar Work with Suppliers and Customers
Representatives of Yandex.Taxi, Uber, Wheely, Aerotaxi and Blablacar discussed how transport services influence city environment, compete against each other and try to get noticed by passengers and drivers. The talk happened on August 12 as part of “Digital August” series and Yota Digital Talks in Strelka Institute in Moscow.
I’ve made a compilation of several answers that participants gave on questions from the audience. Full transcript of the talk was made by “Zukerberg Calls” and you can find in here (Russian).
This post is written by Valentin Dombrovsky — Chief Alchemist at Travelabs.
Dmitri Izmaylov (Uber) (answering the question about possbile Uber negative impact on city environment in New York):
“First of all, there are some people who switch to Uber from driving their own car, probably. And we see ourselves as a competitor to personal vehicle. That’s why we are creating really affordable and reliable service when the taxi is ready in several minutes. If I remember it right, in New York Uber taxi arrives in 3 minutes. So, if we have affordable price and taxi arrives quickly, many people prefer it to personal car and we don’t compete against public transport.
Secondly, mass transit is heavily overloaded in many big cities. I was in New York and used subway there — it’s really hard to get in there during rush hour.
Uber expands existing infrastructure, adds additional options for its clients helping them to move around.
Finally, we’re testing new model for using our service — Uber Pool when one car might transport more than one passenger. How does it work? When you order the car, you tell that you’re ready to go with one more passenger. Taxi grabs you, then it grabs 2nd passenger and you continue your way together. When you drop off, the 2nd passenger continues his way and taxi grabs one more on the way. This model is being tested and if it works fine, it will be 100 % used all over the world. So, I think that Uber helps to enhance city environment and transport infrastructure.
Daria Zolotukhina (Yandex.Taxi) (answering the question about quality control):
“Maybe in the very beginning, in 2011 when we were just launched, we were considered as an aggregator of taxi stations and all complaints were addressed to them. But, in fact, we don’t work like this for a long time already. We have created multi-tier system of quality control.
We have feedback forms, you can call us — each passenger can address his problems to our call center. We’re solving passengers’ problems, we talk to taxi stations and solve all the questions. And we control drivers and vehicles very strictly as well, although all the drivers that work with us have municipal license allowing them to transport passengers and luggage.
We check these licences and we have our own examination procedures — exams for drivers and automated tests. For example, we make drivers to read Russian сlassics like “On seashore far a green oak towers…” and to record it for our audio technologies to recognize (many drivers in Moscow come from nearby republics and don’t know Russian language well —note by VD). We use our technologies for quality control and quality standards maintaining”.
Dmitri Izmaylov (answering the question why Uber doesn’t have call center unlike local competitors Yandex.Taxi or Gett):
“We wanted to reduce the time that client needs to spend to make specific claim. For example, you think that driver has chosen wrong (suboptimal) route. You can write several words about it after your ride — tell that the route wasn’t optimal — and that’s all. Our support service will examine your case and if they see that driver has chosen the wrond way, you’ll get email in which you’ll be told that your ride cost has been recalculated. So, you don’t need to call anywhere and to bother too much”.
Aleksey Lazorenko (Blablacar) (about comparison of Blablacar and taxi apps):
“We’re different not because we’re cheaper — we use entirely another model. People don’t earn money with us— they share costs.
It’s fundamentally different story — it’s more social than business. Of course, we can differentiate in a way that there are rides around the city that are more costly (when you use taxi — note by VD) and there is cheap way to travel between cities, but is it correct to compare such different things? I would argue with that”.
Aleksey Lazorenko (talking about Blablacar problem cases from the audience):
“I’ll go with each case one by one. First, on the need to call each driver and the fact that there’s no opportunity to see which one has all seats booked and which one doesn’t. We understand this issue. We have booking system working well in all Western European countries, where we’re represented, but when we enter new markets, we try to create as little barriers as we can to get people adapted to the service. So, we try to make the communication between driver and passengers as simple as possible and don’t have booking system from the very beginning.
The system will appear in Russia if not in the closest months, then in the end of this year or in the beginning of the next, and we’ll have full featured booking available here. You’ll see, which seats are booked, immediately and will be able to book free seat and to be sure that you and no one else will get the seat. So, we’ll have the problem solved soon. We understand that it’s time to implement the booking system in Russia and we’ll come to that soon.
Now to the question of drivers getting around and looking for pick up spots. We have a feature developed for our mobile app (not sure if it will be on the website) — soon it’ll be possible for driver to see where passenger is located and for passenger to see where’s driver, so they’ll be able to find each other like it happens in Uber, Gett, Wheely or any other taxi app. This feature will be implemented soon, so the problem will be solved.
Speaking about taxi minivans — we accept this problem. We really have those who abuse service rules. Our service is solely for private drivers who publish their own rides and not for commercial use. We have this in our rules and we state clearly that the user accounts will be terminated for abusing this rule. Let me be honest — we have blocked about 5.000 accounts of such users in Russia. We have a huge community in Russia and we regularly battle against commercial drivers. I might say that now we have about 0.5–1% of such users, they’re still trying to get in, there are some crazy people buying 60 sim-cards and creating 60 accounts to publish their rides. We regularly block them, including automatic regime, but still we have very huge community and it’s impossible to exclude all the commercial drivers immediately.
As time goes by, commercial drivers understand that it doesn’t pay — we block them regularly and users complain too. Right now we’re implementing feature that will allow you to complain on commercial driver in 1 click and he’ll be blocked immediately. We don’t have such option yet, but it will be in September-October. So, we still have this problem — it’s practically eliminated, but still remains and we regularly block about 10–50 minivan drivers daily.
And speaking about the rude driver. We can’t provide 100 % guarantee here. The only effective way to get rid of such drivers on the service is leaving honest reviews, so that no one will go with him next time, so it’ll solve the problem. As a last resort, you can complain to the service and we’ll talk to driver and will investigate why he behaves himself badly”.
This post is written by Valentin Dombrovsky — Chief Alchemist at Travelabs.
You can also check out how Uber, Blablacar, Airbnb and HotelTonight approach Russian market.
