Increasing timely Repair & Maintenance: Ola Cabs’ leasing driver-partners

More timely maintenance, More on-road time

About Ola Fleet Technologies

Ola currently has more than 10,00,000 vehicles on road, out of which around 28% of cars are leased to the interested driver-partners through Ola Fleet Technologies. They experience the Ola Partner app in the same way as the car-owned drivers, apart from two things in the ecosystem.

• Incentives: Leasing driver miss the opportunity to earn extra through incentives, but they get high priority during booking allocation.
• Leasing perks: All accidental or timely repair and maintenance (RMT) of the vehicle are covered by Ola through authorized workshops.

How Repair & Maintenance (RMT) work?

Repair and maintenance is a very essential part of maintaining the health of the Ola owned fleet vehicles. Leasing drivers can take advantage of Ola authorized workshops for timely servicing, accidental/regular repairs or any emergency breakdown. Drivers can schedule for any of the services through the leasing section of the app. Users can also request for a tow truck and get an immediate towing facility, in case of emergency breakdowns.

Leasing drivers-partners are totally responsible for Timely maintenance of the leased vehicles.

Why its important for the business?

Timely maintenance ensures that Ola does not incur expensive repair costs due to oversight or neglect on the driver partner’s part. Also, with less car getting off-roaded due to penalty, there will be increase in on-road time of Ola cars.
In order to ensure that we allow the driver partner to schedule RMT with our authorized workshops, we created the RMT flow. For timely car servicing, drivers can schedule from the app, where he selects the date and an available slot on any of the listed workshops. Leasing drivers are trained to consider these services whenever required and are nudged through app communications for timely servicing.

The Challenge

For an average Ola-leased driver, maintenance service counts up to 2–3 times in a month. The user needs to schedule for the service through the app, but only 43% leasing drivers schedule the maintenance service before the last due date of service (adherence maintenance), where 65% use the app and others end up calling Ola support to schedule for them. Our challenge is to —

• Improve adherence maintenance for leasing drivers
• Reduction of Repair & Maintenence scheduling related support calls
• Introduction of night-time maintenance

The Approach

Understanding Current ecosystem

I explored the current app journey for the complete Repair and Maintenence process. The journey starts with in-app communication (snackbar) sent a week before the last servicing date. Users are expected to schedule and service the car before the date to avoid getting off-roaded. Another communication (pop-up) is done 48 hours before the penalty of Late Service. Any user failing to schedule a service before the deadline will be off-roaded and need to complete the service to get back on the platform.

The scheduling flow starts with a selection of date & time-slot, then listing out the available workshop for the same. User can then select the workshop and book the service. Users are communicated 24 hours before the service time and are off-roaded 2 hours before as a buffer time to deliver the car to the workshop.

Research

With the understanding of the current journey, I listened to few support calls related to scheduling. It helped me understand the problems faced at various parts of the journey. It helped me frame my questions and learn the focus for the primary research. Few user quotes were —

• “Help me book a Car service in the app”
• “I forgot to book, now I am off-roaded”
• “My regular workshop is not on the list”
• “Why Ola asks for so many services?”

User interviews

I visited the leasing office with the product manager and interviewed 8 users and also discussed with the Ola agents who help the drivers visiting the office with various issues. We interviewed around the pain points and tried understanding the user’s mental model on timely Car Service. We tried to extract the most common terms they generally use to communicate.

Questions asked were —

• How do you know when to plan for servicing?
• Do you feel Ola asks for too many services?
• Learn Car service experience before joining Ola
• Do you use the app to book? If no why? If yes, where do you face the problems
• What is “Repair & Maintenance” (current terminology). What terms do you generally use?

Discovery

After the research, I used the notes to understand the pain points, goals and need of the user at all stages of the journey. It helped me carve the end-to-end user journey map for the timely maintenance service.

After analysis, I synthesized all the information I have now, which can help me gain insights about the user and find possible solutions to tackle the challenges. Next follows the user insights and design thinking for the same.

Design Directions

Majority of our users were in the driving profession before joining Ola, and are used to a way of planning, scheduling and completing the servicing process in the offline world.

• Users tend to stick to a particular workshop for service and not change it unless required as it hampers their trust.
• Date and time of service is always a secondary factor while booking a workshop for service.
• Overnight servicing is welcomed by all the users that were interviewed.

Design

With the analyzed insights, the team brainstormed on creating flows that connect with the mental model of the user.

Change in flow

The current flow asks the scheduling date first and then show the available workshops, in which the user desired workshop might not be available. Also, unavailable workshops are listed at the bottom of the list (which is generally a very long scroll for Tier 1&2 cities), thus creating a resistance on going ahead on the flow.

Night time Servicing

With the user’s validation, we introduced night time service.

• User will not lose the duty hours and earnings which is the case when a whole day is required for service.
• For business, it will increase the time that the OFT leased vehicles are on the road during peak hours.

The Impact

After the changes in flows and communication channels, along with the introduction of night time service, it was launched in all Tier 1&2 cities across India. Night time service saw an exponential increase in booking counts. After 3 months, we reviewed the impact caused by the changes. Surprisingly, things went pretty well and CTO mentioned it as an impactful project of the quarter.

• After 3 months, ~40% of scheduled maintenance was happening during the night (with lease rental applied)
• Adherence scheduled maintenance increased to 71% (from 43%)

The Team

Pranjal Sutradhar (Product Designer)
Jaisheel Nishad (Principal Designer)
Rajesh M K (Product Manager, OFT)