THE SUGGESTIONS kept flowing as Fred Mazzella hurriedly took out his laptop and started typing everything down while sitting in the front passenger seat. It was early 2008, and Fred was travelling back to Paris after a business trip had taken him to the suburbs of Lyon. He was sharing the journey with Philippe, a member who used BlaBlaCar frequently as a driver.
During the five-hour drive, they discussed everything from music tastes to travel adventures, but the one topic that took centre stage was BlaBlaCar itself. At the time, the platform worked like a classified page with drivers listing their journey and sharing their mobile number. There were no profile pictures, no price algorithm suggestions and no online booking system. As a result, it was difficult to make an informed decision about whom to travel with.
To combat this, Philippe had developed his own strategy to work out the reliable passengers. Whenever an interested passenger would get in touch over the phone, his go-to question would be:
If it was for a friend’s wedding, there would be a degree of certainty that the passenger would show up. If it was to bring dirty laundry back to his/her parents, there would be less certainty. He would write their answers on a Post-It as well as estimate the probability of them showing up, and would subsequently end up with a stack of Post-Its of what he deemed as the most dependable passengers.
Fred was speechless. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that this man was not alone. Other people were creating blacklists — saving unreliable people as no-shows in their mobile phone — so as to screen their calls next time around. A scalable solution was needed to bring trust and reliability to the platform. The timing couldn’t have been better. Co-Founder and CTO Francis Nappez, who had worked nights and weekends coding the beginnings of the platform since 2006, had just joined BlaBlaCar full-time and was working hard to lay down a foundation for the future. Together, they implemented most of the suggestions.
In fact, this journey became one of the most memorable rides to date and truly cemented the idea that “The Member is the Boss”. As one of today’s core values at BlaBlaCar, it ensures that everything that’s built internally must be focused on the user experience and be centred on the value that it brings to members.
Members at the forefront
Providing the best experience to members is fundamental. From the moment they hear about BlaBlaCar to the moment they use the service, the member is always at the forefront of the team’s mind. In fact, nobody is ever considered to simply be a user of the platform. Instead, everyone is seen as an individual member of a broader community of peers that help each other out and BlaBlaCar is the enabler that brings everyone together.
At the heart of BlaBlaCar sits the Member Relations Team. With over 130 employees speaking 20 languages, the team continuously support members in their use of the service across three continents. Put simply, their mission is to make members happy. They reply to 100% of member’s questions, moderate all content published on the platform to make sure it complies with the guidelines, validate the authenticity of new members by checking photos, mobile numbers and email addresses, and continuously gather members’ feedback and suggestions to forward to product and tech teams.
But members of the BlaBlaCar community help out other members too. Why? Because nobody knows the platform better than regulars! BlaBlaHelp, an online service run by BlaBlaCar’s ambassadors, allows new members to ask questions via a live chat to which another proficient member — the “helper” — typically replies with their advice and aids them through the process. The efficiency of this online help is remarkable: 95% of the requests receive an answer within 10 seconds. This voluntary peer-to-peer help chat shows just how committed to their community BlaBlaCar members are.
Listening to members has proven to be the best recipe for building today’s platform. What are the different ways we receive member feedback? Read here.
