Cab Late? This Expert Helped Redesign Dubai's Taxi App Using 2,200 Complaints

A local customer experience expert went through two years' worth of complaints by taxi riders to design an app that makes hiring taxis in Dubai easier.

Rodrigo de Mingo, Chief of User Experience at Dubai Municipality, shared how he sifted through more than 2,200 complaints, took taxis and interviewed both drivers and users to make the S'hail app easier to use in his previous role.

“In the research phase, the main objective was to get user insights and understand what the issues with the users were,” he said. He shared how he interviewed users at the Customer Experience (CX) Lab and collected data from various places including Apple store, Google Play store and customer happiness meetings. When his car broke down while he was in the middle of the research, he booked more than 18 taxis and spoke to every single driver to find pain points.

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Rodrigo was speaking at CX Evolve, organised by Khaleej Times events, that brought together some of the region's most influential CX leaders and decision-makers to discuss the future of the industry. He was illustrating how customer experience insights could be used by businesses to improve their services, build loyalty and increase revenue.

He further explained why it was important to experience the pain points himself.“Most of the people at the CX lab are working on their desk,” he said.“They don't go outside and use the service so they cannot get this real feedback and emotions from people when they are facing these type of issues.”

Rodrigo explained that it was difficult to go through thousands of complaints one by one, so he created a system to deal with it.“When you have more than 2,000 complaints, you can't solve them one by one,” he said.“So I ranked keywords, grouped feedback, and found the patterns.”

He discovered that the taxi not arriving was one of the most common issues with 88 per cent of the users experiencing it.“So, I started breaking it down into small pieces,” he said.“Behind every complaint is a real user problem. My job is to find out what they really meant. I called them one by one, interviewed them and tried to understand the one question - what was the real issue.”

He also found issues like poor payment options, lack of live updates, and communication barriers with drivers. He then used affinity mapping, sentiment analysis, and other techniques to address customer pain points.

“So, we put together an old-fashioned design with something new, where you can define the type of taxi, show the duration of the taxi information and place notes to the drivers,” he said. He added that during this journey, he also uncovered unmet needs like child seat requests, pet transport, and accessibility limitations.

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