Martech Spotlight: Careem
The makings of a multi-service platform begin with a sound vision, a willingness to leverage automation to do the heavy lifting and using data as a compass to pivot The pandemic tested most enterprises. For the team at Careem, it was an opportunity to realise its vision since Careem was never a pure mobility service. […]
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The makings of a multi-service platform begin with a sound vision, a willingness to leverage automation to do the heavy lifting and using data as a compass to pivot
The pandemic tested most enterprises. For the team at Careem, it was an opportunity to realise its vision since Careem was never a pure mobility service. From the very beginning in 2012, when Magnus Olsson (Co-founder) and Mudassir Sheikha (Co-founder & CEO) set up the company, they spoke about offering solutions to simplify people’s lives. At the time, this saw fruition as a business opportunity in the ride-hailing industry. Later, it came to mean different things.
In 2020, when consumers were homebound owing to the pandemic-induced lockdowns, Careem elevated itself to an app ecosystem, adding food delivery and digital payments to its list of solutions.
Careem works with Zendesk to support its customer care team. It uses automation for internal tickets related to drivers’ registration, processing documents, customer emails about rides and food delivery, and internal collaboration between agents that need to be escalated.
It’s a complex system of communication, and the leadership at Careem identified early in 2013 that automation is the best way to manage the task.
When rideshare support tickets dropped at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Careem saw this as an opportunity to go into its support system to experiment and retool for a new era. In three weeks, the company moved all of its agents to a work-from-home model, including all BPO agents and in-house employees—with no interruption to service.
It ordered a deep-dive analysis of its support system. It looked at insights pre-pandemic and cross-referenced them against the new normal. Based on the findings, Careem could pivot to a more stable model that would work during the pandemic. It adopted a self-service model.
This added the benefit of deflecting tickets and reducing support volume. The Guide system has also allowed Careem to become more agile in making changes to the system without having to punt every change to engineering.
Localised loyalty programmes
Careem is operational in over 100 cities, covering 12 countries across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia regions. While the core foundational systems let it operate globally, it uses localised loyalty programmes via Careem Rewards in sync with the company’s vision of paying it forward. A user earns points for each Careem ride they take, and can then use their points to give back to those in need or take free rides.
Depending on where you open the app, you’ll see a different set of rewards that you can redeem. In Dubai, for example, it partnered with Dubai Cares so users could use their points to provide education for underprivileged children, whereas in Riyadh it partnered with the local charity Disabled Children’s Association. The ability to recognise local charities and see the impact makes a big impact on consumer consciousness.
A digital-first platform
Careem tapped into Sparkcentral by Hootsuite to rapidly grow its community across its social channels. Since 2016, Careem and Sparkcentral have engaged with brand advocates, and discovered actionable insights to help grow the business.
Early on, the brand realised that while good news flows slowly via word-of-mouth, bad reviews take a quick route via social shoutouts that can damage its reputation. Operational snags are unavoidable, so the company took a proactive approach to resolve issues quickly and communicate clearly with customers.
To engage its community of drivers (which it calls Captains), Sparkcentral used technology to smoothen workflows.
Later, this system was expanded to offer a unified platform for social teams to handle engagement across social channels from anywhere — a critical feature in a time of distributed teams and remote work.
With teams working across different objectives, the ability to tag and filter messages helps the team make sense of a deluge of inbound communication.
The team uses Sparkcentral to report on KPIs, then shares reports with marketing, service, operations, and partner teams to spot issues or opportunities and mine for insights.
Satisfaction at scale
Careem measures CSAT across its messaging channels, making it easier to spot and handle complaints or bad experiences immediately. The company’s CSAT scores rose from 93 per cent in 2018 to 96 per cent in 2020.
The Careem virtual agent deflects 25 per cent of inbound inquiries in Facebook Messenger, its busiest inbound channel. Careem leadership credits the chatbot’s success to high-quality content delivered in a friendly, conversational tone.
In order to stay on top of the mobile economy, Careem partnered with Adjust to help with granular data collection. The main objective was to be able to benchmark organic traffic against paid activity, and create an most efficient media buying strategy to scale the business.
The leadership needed a way to see the entire user journey—through different campaigns. By tagging and tracking all its in-app events from install to the first ride, Careem synced all the granular event data back to its servers. This allowed the company to know and understand users and their needs, build better products and design custom offers. By leveraging Adjust’s services, Careem increased bookings by 35 per cent and optimised CPO by 40 per cent.
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