Customer experience lessons from Singapore superapp Grab

With a data-driven philosophy, Grab is permanently on the lookout for how it can offer more innovative, safer, more convenient, and ever more fantastic customer experiences. Steven van Belleghem finds out more about the tactics this Singaporean app used to delight customers and grow its business

The success story of Grab is perhaps one of the most impressive business stories of the last decade. It started out as a simple taxi-hailing app in 2012, but quickly evolved into fields like mobile e-payments (GrabPay) and food delivery services (GrabFood) to become Southeast Asia’s first ‘decacorn’ – or start-up with a valuation of over $10 billion USD.

So how did Grab become so successful and make it onto Fast Company’s ‘Most Innovative Companies’ list? Here are some of the incredibly intelligent tactics it used.

Partner experience

It is commonly said that employee experience is the backbone of customer experience, and I truly believe that happy employees beget happy customers. Grab is taking this approach one step further, by creating a fantastic and empowering partner experience with its drivers – which perhaps stands in contrast with how other platform companies in the US treat their drivers.

This relationship driven platform approach is quite typical for Asian cultures. Alibaba and Didi, for instance, use the same tactics. This continuous attention for improving the lives of its drivers has its roots in a challenge that dates from their early days when the average Singaporean taxi driver could not afford smartphones. Grab first gave them smartphones on a payment plan, then the Grab team went into the field to explain the technology (and other apps such as WhatsApp and Google Maps) to these drivers at airports, shopping malls and gas stations.

This close relationship with drivers and a policy of addressing socio-economic challenges has been deeply engrained in Grab’s company culture. Not surprisingly, its driver-partners earn 32% more income per hour compared with average worker wages of other platforms, and Grab is continuously striving to make rides more profitable for drivers. A great example is the collaboration with Cargo which allows the drivers to sell a selection of snacks, toiletries, and phone chargers during their trip, on which they make a 25% commission, but they have also rolled out over 100 initiatives to help drivers- and delivery-partners, frontliners and communities who were struggling because of the pandemic.

It’s clear that Grab is a great fan of the ‘pay it forward’ principle: help your drivers as much as possible and they will help your customers as best they can too.

Get out of your own lane

Diversification has become a big part of innovation, and Grab is completely on board with that trend. It may have started out in the mobility sector, with a ride-hailing app but as time ticks by, it keeps venturing in other mobility-segments and even other industries.

At first, Grab only diversified its mobility offering. GrabTaxi – originally called ‘My Teksi’ – expanded with GrabCar (using personal cars instead of taxis) and motorcycle ride service GrabBike. Later GrabCar+ (with higher-end cars) was added, as well as GrabHitch (carpooling), GrabExpress (last mile delivery), GrabCoach (large passenger vehicles), GrabFamily (with child restraint seats for young children below 7 years old) and GrabPet (with drivers who have received training in pet-handling). They were later all added to the simplified flat-fare structure JustGrab.

Grab understands the power of niches like no other, but realises just as much the value of jumping to other industries. From passenger mobility, it moved on to packages and food with GrabFood food delivery and the GrabExpress courier service. In 2016, it launched the GrabPay payment service as a digital payment service among third-party merchants, allowing users to use the app for purchases outside of ride-hailing as well.

The year after, it acquired Indonesian online payment startup Kudo to integrate its platform in Grab’s payment system. This was Grab’s first step into expanding fintech services. In 2018, it then went on to launch Grab Financial, which offers payment, insurance, and financing services. At the end of last year, it was even granted a digital bank license in Singapore to further expand its financial services offerings.

These financial power moves are in fact very similar to those of the Chinese Alibaba Group and its financial affiliate the Ant Group. Asian platform companies love to think further than the payment functionalities of their initial offering. And that’s because they understand that the customer experience does not begin and end with their own product and service but is impacted by the entire context around it.

Think in ecosystems

Rather than completely reinventing the wheel when launching in a new segment or industry, Grab focuses on forming partnerships or even acquiring players who have the experience they lack. It works with governments, banks, insurers, and telco players in order to make transportation and transactions safer, more affordable, and more reliable.

Its collaborations are numerous, and there are few visible examples. In Thailand, Grab collaborates with Krungsri Finnovate to promote ‘sustainable banking’ through financial inclusion, and it also signed a partnership with Chubb to provide innovative, customised and cost-effective in-app insurance solutions throughout Southeast Asia. Hyundai and Kia partnered with Grab to increase EV usage in Southeast Asia and Microsoft invested in Grab to improve user safety and experience with artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

Few approaches to innovation match the speed and convenience of creating an ecosystem with smart partnerships. The more fully formed services a company can offer on top of its existing offer, the better customers will be served, and Grab has truly excelled at this approach.

Offer a fantastic experience

Lack of safety is unfortunately still one of the most important forms of friction in ride-hailing, so Grab invests a lot of money in improving user safety. One very important project is the work with Microsoft to use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to verify the drivers and passengers, but they also use the customer experience platform Sprinklr to listen to what customers like and dislike on social media, picking up mentions of drivers’ reckless behaviour.

The ‘Share My Ride’ option in the Grab app also allows passengers to share their ride details with loved ones, which is not just convenient but also a form of reassurance for people who aren’t feeling comfortable when riding at night. Trip monitoring technology is used to track deviations from the planned route, as well as unplanned stops that will trigger a notification on the passenger’s app to check if he or she is fine. Grab also uses telemetric data to detect crashes and trigger an emergency call for an ambulance.

But it’s not just the safety that’s focused on. Grab wants the overall customer experience to be perfect. For food delivery it uses a data-driven approach, predicting which delivery partners can deliver orders in the fastest time based on location, food preparation time estimation, real-time and historical traffic data, delivery distance, and more. It helps delivery partners take the most efficient routes and reduce any idle time so that they can earn more.

Machine learning and AI models also allow it to track down food demand gaps in certain cities and closing them by establishing and expanding cloud kitchen networks, giving consumers access to more cuisine options.

With this data-driven philosophy, Grab is permanently on the lookout for how it can offer more innovative, safer, more convenient, and ever more fantastic customer experiences.