Here’s How Uber Pioneers Intelligent Customer Experience

In times gone by, customer experience just wasn’t something B2B brands spent and awful lot of time thinking about. The interactions between B2B buyers and sellers were always very perfunctory and performative and little consideration was given to anything outside the basic business of making and facilitating a purchase.

However, those times are rapidly fading into memory and, as you will have no doubt read in the other articles in this series, the lines between B2B and B2C are becoming ever more blurred.

This means customer experience is now an essential element of the B2B landscape and those brands looking to succeed in 2022 should definitely consider moving it up the agenda.

Uber

As the world’s most well-known ride hailing service – outside of New York’s famous yellow taxis or the iconic black Hackney carriages of London perhaps – Uber has had a meteoric rise.

The San Francisco-based tech giant has achieved this by always putting customer experience at the fore of its business strategy and making the business of getting a lift somewhere as frictionless as possible.

“A negative peak or an end to an experience can completely bias a customer’s judgement,” said Head of Customer Experience for Uber in Australia and New Zealand, Maisie Lam. “It means you need to know where in your users’ experience there is negative friction, or even positive peaks and resolutions.”

As you might expect from a company with such a firm focus on digital technology, Uber using powerful data analytics to help it remove friction from the ride hailing process. Data driven insights help Uber improve its in-app help centre for both riders and drivers and optimize its chat support, to name just two touchpoints where friction can occur.

One element of customer experience Uber is always cognizant of when implementing any change is the inherent bias blind spots we as humans can possess.

“We can easily recognize the impact of biases on other people’s behaviour and judgements, but we are very poor at noticing the impact of biases on ourselves,” Lam explained. “It’s easy to underestimate the impact of a change in the context of your customers and support staff. And it’s easy to assume you understand user or agent experiences based on your own experience.”

Uber Business

Another corner of its operation Uber has been focussing on is its B2B arm – Uber for Business.

Ever since the COVID-19 crisis flipped all the metaphorical tables over, Uber for Business has been working to support global industry and develop solutions which would improve the commuting experience for its B2B customers.

Employee Group Rides and Business Charter both offer riders new ways to travel to and from work locations in a manner which is safe and comfortable and sympathetic of the differing readiness of people when it comes to being close to others. Uber’s food delivery arm – Uber Eats – has also been supporting back to work initiatives by enabling lunch deliveries to offices when other options have been unavailable.

deliveries to offices when other options have been unavailable. “During this time, Uber for Business has remained committed to supporting businesses through the launch of new commuting solutions to help companies plan their return-to-work strategies, fast-tracking the expansion of its Uber Eats solutions into over 20 countries in 2020 due to increased interest, and expanding of delivery solutions with the launch of Uber Direct,” said the company in a recent blog post.

As a result of these initiatives, Uber for Business has seen over 30x growth of users on Uber Eats and continues to sign up new organisations at a rapid clip, with active organisations growing 23% in November 2021.

Final Thoughts

With its connections to so much of the working day – from commuting to lunchtime – Uber is ideally placed to support businesses during the COVID recovery. By reducing friction in its processes and placing customer experience as a top priority, Uber is making sure it will continue to be a key player in the B2B space in 2022.

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