Customer experience is a tricky nut to crack if you’re a micromobility operator.
It is much more than just ensuring your vehicles are available in the right place at the right time.
Was it easy to register on the app? Was it easy to unlock? Is the vehicle in good condition? Did I have a good experience riding that vehicle?
If the answer is no to any of these questions and the customer logs a complaint, many operators simply don’t have the bandwidth to respond. The result?
“Most users who have bad riding experiences are to a large part ignored by operators,” says Mike Manchip, CEO and Founder of Anadue. “They’re not purposefully ignored. It’s just a resourcing issue.”
Anadue is a global automation and profitability analytics platform for shared micromobilty companies.
“In our experience, smaller operators have slim workforces, limited access to data science expertise, and generally handle complaints manually with customer care people, when actually much of this could be automated.”
How to alleviate poor experiences
Over the last 12 months, Anadue has been developing its automation tools that makes decisions and implements changes for operations teams to improve customer experience.
“Our automation will analyse data, find a problem, suggest what to do to fix that problem, and if the operator is comfortable with it, even implement a change to make that problem go away,” says Manchip.
Anadue’s software works by detecting anomalies in data patterns.
“There’s a number of different layers to automation, right? The first thing to consider is the vehicle because vehicles annoy customers. So we can look at the vehicles that have had the most short rides, the vehicles that have had the most one star reviews but we can also look at issues with payments, registering and so on.
“For example, only this morning we detected that one e-scooter had caused 24 poor experiences over the last 30 days. And all the complaints are the same, they all say the back wheel is loose and I nearly died.”
Manchip says this is so “wasteful of customers” as they will just jump ship by using another operator when this could have been picked up and corrected very quickly.
Instead of an operations manager just receiving a report listing the vehicles that need looking at, Anadue’s software can tell them where the vehicle is parked and then create a task for an engineer, removing the decision making process entirely.
“That’s a big leap forward as far as efficiency goes,” asserts Manchip. “And we can take the vehicle out of service automatically.”
Anadue can also automate the customer care and compensation process for users who have had bad experiences.
Whether that means giving users back their unlock fee or offering an extra day on their monthly subscription, this can be achieved without human intervention.
“In the longer term for subscribers that have disengaged with an operator, we can also automate the process of re-engaging with customers to encourage them to begin using the service again,” explains Manchip. “So that’s three ways we can use automation to help improve customer experience and significantly impact an operator’s bottom line.”
Detecting valuable customers
While the goal for operators is to respond to all queries, if they are stretched, then they need a way to detect the most valuable customers.
Manchip shares an example of what a good customer looks like and the type of issue an operator receives.
“This customer has done 186 trips in total, generating an average revenue per month of €86 so you can see that the lifetime value for some of these customers is absolutely enormous – he needs addressing.
“This particular trip rating he gave 1, while his average trip rating is 5 so the difference is 4. This means he doesn’t always leave bad reviews, so we can detect if he’s trying to game the system. For this particular trip, he paid €1.60 and the feedback he left was – “is broken please return money and me. I have a pass, why do I have to pay?” He’s saying he has a subscription, we can see he doesn’t but it has probably expired. We can either automatically issue him a refund or create a task for someone to respond.”
Poor experiences = loss of customers
A recent study by Anadue of its operators’ 600k+ users found that 10-15% of people who leave an operator had two poor experiences as their last rides with that operator.
“We know there is a strong correlation between people who leave and poor experience.”
In an industry that is being squeezed financially by lack of capital investment, and with operators looking to be more hands on without increasing their headcount – this is where automation fits into the puzzle.
“We can address every customer issue, every faulty e-bike or e-scooter, while at the same time boost an operator’s profitability. Losing customers is extremely damaging for a business so let’s use AI to ensure no rider goes unheard.”
