XM Knowledge Base
Customer Experience
How Uber is building a new age of intelligent CX
As organizations continue to adapt to the changing world around us, every single business and government has a momentous opportunity to take the customer and employee experiences they deliver to an entirely new level.
During XM Live: Succeeding in the Age of Experience Transformation, we were privileged to get a rare glimpse into how iconic brands are building experience-centric organizations to drive business outcomes and success.
Uber is famous the world-over for transforming the customer experience in the rideshare and food delivery industries. But like nearly every organization across the world, the pandemic challenged Uber to rethink how to make engagements easier and safer for customers, drivers, and employees.
The solution to this challenge - according to Maisie Lam, Head of Customer Experience for Uber in Australia and New Zealand - was removing friction from the customer experience. Something that’s not always an easy task when you have hangry customers.
“A negative peak or an end to an experience can completely bias a customer’s judgment. It means you need to know where in your users’ experience there is negative friction, or even positive peaks and resolutions,” said Maisie.
Using insights and behavioral science to remove friction
Using behavioral science - powered by insights from across the customer journey - Uber focused its efforts on removing friction from the customer journey to build a customer experience that was simple, intuitive, quick, and easy. From using insights to improve the in-app help center for customers and riders, through to identifying how it could optimize its Chat Support, Uber identified issues impacting its customer experience, and then took quick, targeted, meaningful action. The result has been a continual improvement to the company’s CSAT across various channels.
A key pillar in Uber’s experience transformation is being aware of the bias blind spot.
“We can easily recognize the impact of biases on other people’s behavior and judgments, but we are very poor at noticing the impact of biases on ourselves,” explained Maisie.
“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.
“This means you need to be aware of cultural contexts when big change happens - in fact, this needs to be front and center of planning. You need to be conscious of the risk this change presents to the support channel. Using behavioral science and insights into your customer experience will help you diagnose where behavioral friction may be present,” said Maisie.
Driving continuous innovation
Uber’s constant desire to innovate by designing and continually improving experiences for customers’ and employees’ changing preferences and behaviors is why the company is a leader in the various sectors it operates. And it’s all possible because Uber is continuously listening and responding to the needs of the people it serves.
XM Live Session: How Uber uses data & insights to inform business decisions