By Sooraj Rajmohan

What would be your ideal ride-hailing experience? Let me guess, you open your preferred app (hopefully Gojek if you’re in SE Asia), find that your location is accurately displayed, select your transport mode of choice, make a booking, and forget about things until the app helpfully nudges you to inform the arrival of your ride. Verify details, get in (or on, if you’re using our bike taxi service GoRide), and off you go.

That would be the ideal situation, and our dream is to get there one day.
But old habits die hard.

In a high-context nation like Indonesia, where driver partners and riders still remember the dark days before Gojek when rides involved haggling and pleading, trust is not implicitly built into the system. This means even with the convenience of modern technology, our riders and driver partners often prefer some form of confirmation that both parties will honour their booking commitment. Until we reach utopia where everyone has absolute trust in the system, we knew we had to nudge things along a bit.

That’s how Trip Advisor was born.

Little steps, Big changes

Trip Advisor tries to predict customer behaviour based on historical data, and provides drivers context on what they could do to avoid a potential cancellation.

Cool idea, but how do you solve something as basic as trust?

In our case, we decided to look at all the scenarios where the trust factor could lead to a customer cancelling the booking. Were they using our service for the first time? Was this their first booking from a new location? Was location accuracy at the location historically poor? Does this user have a tendency to cancel bookings if they do not receive a confirmation from the driver partner?

That’s a lot of stuff to sift through, but we knew we were on the right track. After all, a large percentage of our bookings already saw some form of communication between driver partners and customers — usually as an acknowledgement that the driver was indeed on their way, or the customer giving additional details about pickup location.

We had distilled down the pain points to their most basic root causes. Now to solve them.

If it’s slightly broken, fix it

Sure, trust was the problem, but we had evidence that our partners and customers were already working towards fixing it through their chats. So we picked up the main problems they were trying to solve, and tailored Trip Advisor accordingly.

Here’s an example. If a customer makes a booking, and we find them a driver partner, Trip Advisor analyses historic data to predict what conditions could potentially cause the customer to cancel the booking. If it finds that the customer may cancel if the driver does not acknowledge they are on the way, Trip Advisor steps in to help.

As you can see from the above image, the driver gets a helpful pop up informing them of the potential cancellation risk, and is guided to send a canned I’m on my way chat message (with just two clicks) to reassure the customer.

As both parties were using chat to communicate anyway, we decided context-based canned messages would be the best solution—reinforcing an existing habit, and reducing cognitive load on drivers so they can focus on driving and reaching the pickup location quickly.

Here’s a list of other scenarios Trip Advisor currently handles:

The work goes on

Trip Advisor is one of the many experiments Gojek’s Pickup Experience team works on to give our stakeholders the best possible experience on our Super App platform. We’ve already rolled out the feature to all our GoRide and GoCar driver partners in Indonesia. ✌️

Some of those regions saw an overall drop up to 4% in Booking Cancellation Rate, with drivers who used the feature seeing over 50% decrease in customer cancellations in some cases. 👀

After we rolled out Trip Advisor, we decided to get some feedback on it from the people it was built for, our driver partners. Here’s what some of them had to say:

“It’s beneficial and convenient to send faster confirmation to the customer with a suggested chat message.” — Toha

“It’s so simple that we can just click and no need to type our message.” — Herlina

“It’s helpful to know whether the pickup point is accurate or not based on the customer booking history.” — Haris

As you can see, the results are encouraging, and we’re continually working on improving Trip Advisor even further. It’s only a small step on the road to the ideal experience, but it’s a start.

Did we mention this is only one of the many things we’re working on to improve our pickup and ride experience? Keep watching this space for more!