Last week we shipped an upcoming rides widget on the Shoffr website. Guests who are logged in can now see the details of their upcoming ride the first thing on the home page. With driver details etc covered there, they do not have to rely only on our SMS updates for this information.
Why
The main way we communicate with our guests today is via SMSes. We send SMSes for login, booking, cancellation, driver allocation etc etc. However, SMSes are not always reliable or timely. We have had a few guests reach out to us on the phone to resolve various situations they were in (e.g. unable to book because the OTP isn't reaching, the message with driver details in it didn't reach them etc).
One way to address this is to add more modes of communication like email, WhatsApp etc. We are working on this.
But it also pointed us to a big gap on our website — it was completely transactional and stateless. Sure, you could go to the account section and see your trips etc if you were logged in, but the home page had no special behaviour regardless of a guest being logged in or not.
So we took the first little step in making the website a little more context sensitive by adding a widget showing the details of a guest's upcoming trip (if any in the next 3 days) along with driver details etc as a driver is assigned.
How
Technically, building this was simple enough. Just call an API to get the details of the next ride if the guest is logged in and render the details.
Impact
We expect that this will reduce the anxiety about ride details most guests have and also give them a reason to engage more actively with the website. For us, this should mean fewer guests calling on the phone and hence more time to do other awesome stuff.
So if you have booked a Shoffr for the coming few days, you can use this widget and not worry about missing SMSes.
Evolving
This is a small start towards making our website sensitive to the customer context. This is going to be a key focus area for us in the coming weeks. Ideally we would like to be able to offer our guests the most pertinent information at any time in their Shoffr journey. e.g. Car tracking when pickup time is imminent, fare/payment details when the ride is about to end, feedback after the ride, and so on.