Soon as I had finished a ride with Easy Taxi, I got a call on my mobile asking how the ride had been. The other day, when a booking failed to materialise, for some reason, I couldn’t get the app to work, I receive a call asking me if there had been a problem and could they help?
Such is the speed of customer service at Easy Taxi, the Brazil-based mobile taxi hailing service which is fighting GrabTaxi, the Malaysian-based start-up, for market share in Asia. Since its start-up in 2011, Easy Taxi, funded mainly by Rocket Internet, has received $77m in funding while GrabTaxi recently received a $15m injection.
Easy Taxi’s use of voice versus GrabTaxi’s use of instant messages for customer service is what it hopes will differentiate it. That and the focus it places on relationships with taxi drivers.
Mario Berta: “The only app you’ll ever need to travel across the world”.
Regional managing director for Asia Mario Berta said that 85% of time, money and resources – it has 1,500 employees worldwide – is spent on building and maintaining relationships with taxi drivers, with the rest spent on customer service. Its NLC policy – Never Lose a Customer – “means that everytime you complete a ride, you receive a phone call to ask about the service”.
He admits that as the company grows, it’s hard to achieve 100% but “the majority of customers will receive a call”.
Added Berta, “Generally the consumer does not understand how tough is the taxi driver’s job – we empathise with that. Singapore has the highest education among taxi drivers in the world – most of them are part-time or driving after retirement.”
In the Philippines, Berta said Easy Taxi “bankerised drivers who had never seen an ATM. We also give scholarships to kids of our best drivers because in the Philippines, education is the best incentive.”
Singapore is the biggest market – estimated at 700,000 taxi trips a day by market sources. “You have demand and supply and a tech-savvy population. In Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, we had to teach drivers the difference between pressing and wiping the screen because they use feature phones. “In Indonesia, there is a strong competitor, Bluebird, and the market is more challenging there.”
In Malaysia, the fact that MyTeksi, the name under which GrabTaxi operates, had educated the market made it an easier entry for Easy Taxi. And one positive outcome of these taxi apps is that taxi drivers will be forced to use meters “because consumers will only book taxis through the app and drivers will only get jobs through the app. One complaint of misbehavior and we take the driver out of the system.”
So far focused on growth, Easy Taxi is taking its first step towards monetization. It launched a global rollout of a corporate scheme that targets businesses and charges them a 10% admin fee. The scheme is now available in Singapore and Malaysia, with more markets in Asia to be added.
Companies which sign up are given an incentive of three free rides and the admin fee of 10% will be waived for 60 days. The promotion period ends September 30. “Easy Taxi Corporate is a unique solution aimed at corporations. Employees do not pay the drivers, there’s an in-app transaction where the company gets billed at the end of the month. We can set parameters such as an allowance limit or timing so the platform cannot be abused.”
Started by Tallis Gomez in Brazil in 2011, Easy Taxi claims to be the biggest taxi app in the world with 10 million downloads and 200,000 registered taxi drivers. “We are a marketplace that connects passengers and drivers,” said Berta.
Based in Manila, he has established Easy Taxi in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea and, of course, the Philippines. Latin America is East Taxi’s biggest market and Asia accounts for 30% of the business and “when you compare the growth when Easy Taxi first started in LATAM, Asia’s growing at a much faster pace”.
Commenting on news that some countries were trying to ban Uber – which he says is a different model from Easy Taxi which only works with metered taxis and not private cars, Berta said, “People need to admit the world is changing. People will not take taxis on the streets anymore, that’s the game changer. They will book on their phone and wait for their rides.
“Taxi drivers are entrepreneurs and it is up to them to choose the best solution for them, that allows them to enhance their income.”
Easy Taxi is integrated with WeChat in Singapore and is in talks with other partners to expand its distribution. Thus far, its focus is on local commuters. It’d like to target incoming tourists but faces local problems such as “empty taxis cannot go into the arrival in Manila airport”.
Its goal is to become “the only app you’ll ever need to travel across the world”.I
