Uber India - The Lost Opportunity

Earlier this year, I was watching Manikarnika and I was again reminded that Britishers were certainly shrewd when they came to India, but it was the Indians who nurtured them into evil. Today the same is true when I look at Uber India.

In December 2014, when an Uber driver raped a woman, the company almost stopped its entire India operations for a few months. But now, when such incidents happen, the company refuses to even issue an apology or say what they would be doing to not let this happen in future. One could argue that the woman in 2014 sued Travis directly and that too in USA, so Uber had to be more prompt in responding. I still believe that Uber India executives must have apprised the Uber headquarters of the pathetic law situation in India and how their lawyers could drag such cases forever. Now they don't even care to give an official statement on issues as big as this one where a celebrity is involved.

If you have used Uber in USA or in Europe, you will notice that Uber drivers and their cars are great but both the cars and drivers are pathetic when you use the service in India, the overall experience sucks 8 out of 10 times. This is primarily because Uber experience/product/service has been built based on their experience with drivers & cars in USA. In US, it is hard to get a license but quite easy to drive. If a driver commits any blunders such as spitting on the road, talking on mobile phone while driving, speeding, etc; the ecosystem is equipped to penalize them heavily. A 3-year old car is almost like new and Google Maps work almost perfectly.

When Uber came to India in 2014, they assumed the conditions are more or less same and rolled out the service. Over the first few months, the drivers and cars were great. And then.. they hired the India leadership team with a mandate to scale up & scale up fast. Now, incentives drive behavior. None of them chose to focus on the Uber experience, they instead came with their old bag of tricks. We should add "cash" as an option to pay. We should incentivize drivers to refer their friends. We should decrease the cost for the customer to almost 0 and we should pay exceptionally high incentives for the drivers that it is impossible for anyone else to match.

Instead of telling them the right things to do such as to have a phone number for prompt customer service, Uber India management must have suggested to their US leadership that the customers can't call Uber at all but the Uber customer service can choose to call the customer at any point of time. When they were told to maintain customer privacy, they came up with an even more fancy solution. If the driver calls the customer, it goes via a call center but if the customer calls the driver, the customer's number is conveniently shown to the driver. I am sure that the person who came up with this solution was rewarded handsomely for reducing the call center costs by half albeit putting the customer's privacy at risk.

Try creating such a service in USA where the company has all the power and the customers have none, and there will be multiple class action lawsuits filed against the company but in India, anything goes.

Instead of improving the driver quality and weeding out bad apples, it seems there is a constant effort to scale up even further. I won't be surprised if they have told their senior management that if we quickly employ millions of drivers, we can assure you that even the Indian government can't hold us accountable for anything. No government will want to make millions of drivers unemployed and lose so many votes in one go.

Uber had a massive opportunity to fix the entire traffic situation in India if they had chosen "superior service" over scale. Using technology and the power of hundreds of millions of customers, they could have easily improved the majority of Indian drivers and the driving experience for everyone else. It would have been a slow process but it could have been financially rewarding in the long run. They could have chosen to learn from Amazon, which came to India almost 6-7 years after Flipkart, but is now known for their superior customer service. Today, no one believes that Uber is even 10% superior to Ola.

By the way, Uber India still hasn't started being "very evil" yet. All Uber drivers tell me how Uber always pays them on time unlike Ola. I will be not be surprised if even that changes over time.

May be someday Lyft will choose to come to India, learn from Uber India's mistakes and make tons of profit. Please note that I have chosen not to talk about Ola in the entire article because Ola is pathetic across the world, not just India.