Grab Car: Recruiting Ride-hailing Drivers

Going through that onboarding process, were there any particularly sticky parts with the driver where you’re really trying to onboard them face-to-face at the gas station?

First, what we face a lot is the driver, they want to make more money through the platform. They don’t want to spend a lot of time listening to what the trainer has to say or the salesperson at the spot have to say. Sometimes they just are forgetting things. They don’t remember which button, how to press. They didn’t deliver the service as we expected because they didn’t remember, or they didn’t pay attention for the whole process. The whole process takes almost one hour for one session. Either one-to-one person or one to a group. Some of them are just picking up some other things. The process needs to be recapped and needs to be repeated from time to time. It’s so different.

When we launched Grab Car, it’s quite another story because Grab Car, they are educated people. People like us, we’re educated, and we have a car. It’s just parked in the parking lot and we want to make money out of it. You just register your car and your mobile with the platform. Then you go out and running. Just like Uber. People are more expecting the best user experience out of the platform. More than just making a lot of money because we have other sources of income, but this is something we want to do, you have time and you want to convert it into some income.

They are two different types of people, right? Like you mentioned, you had the farmer, which is the registered taxi driver. They’re renting a taxi and have been a taxi driver for a certain period of time. Then the other people, the Grab Car situation, which is similar to Uber, it’s I have a car sitting there, I can earn money from this. Why don’t I just try to leverage this asset and drive it about in my free time?

Correct.

What were the strategies you used with Grab Car to onboard drivers?

The way that we try to onboard Grab Car drivers, because they are educated people and they are capable of using the digital sales onboarding methods. What we do is, we try to use the opensource platform like a Google Form and at that time, we only have Google Form, so we ask them to come to the office and give them a proper training. When I say a proper training, it means we have a room, we put them into one room and then we tell them from A to Z of what they have to do, which button they have to press. Later on, it’s developed into all the products. When I say products, all of the applications, how to use things like that, it’s all in the video clip. Then we’re using the classroom to tell them the service they have to deliver. Tell them the benefits, which is changing from time to time. We let them in and then we tell them in the classroom what they will earn out of the platform. Yes, the rest of the process, that is only 20 percent in the classroom. 80 percent of it is self-registered.