Improving driver productivity in Southeast Asia

IN the bustling landscape of Southeast Asia’s ride-sharing industry, navigating the competitive market requires a delicate balance between addressing the needs of driver-partners and ensuring exceptional service for passengers.

As such, Grab has implemented a number of strategic improvements to its service platform, which will simultaneously benefit both driver-partners and passengers, including a number of new features to assist in the daily operations of its driver-partners.

Time maximization

One of the main problems that arises during meetings with driver partners is downtime on the road.

To combat this, Grab has introduced new features to help its driver partners optimize their earnings and time spent on the platform.

One of those features is the introduction of Zones. These zones have a predefined list of geographic areas where drivers can sign up to drive for a fixed period of time, between three and five hours.

The inclusion of zones makes it easier for driver partners to increase their income.

Registering in specific areas ensures that drivers will only receive reservations within the areas in which they registered.

The inclusion of zones makes it easier for drivers to increase their earnings by allowing them to complete more trips per hour online, with shorter distances traveled between trips.

The My Destination feature works in a similar way, allowing drivers to indicate the destination they want to go to, while ensuring that the reservations assigned to them will get them closer to their destination.

Another newly introduced feature is the heat map, which predicts and highlights where high demand areas will be based on historical data and real-time information.

The Heatmap also indicates the average wait time for a reservation in each area, as well as giving drivers the option to move to any featured area to increase their booking chances.

Hotspot Navigation is a similar offering that specifically predicts the closest on-demand hotspots to a driver’s location based on real-time data.

This feature, which is currently being tested in Singapore, will even help driver partners navigate the most efficient routes to hotspots, if they decide to head to those areas.

Perfect driving experience

To improve the overall driving experience for both drivers and passengers, Grab has launched an improved version of GrabMaps.

GrabMaps provides location-based intelligence and services, backed by a comprehensive mapping solution that is continually updated to document alleyways and even narrow side streets throughout Southeast Asia.

This updated map helps reduce unnecessary time spent by driver partners by providing an accurate estimated time of arrival and ensuring the best and most efficient route possible to complete trips.

Having trouble locating your Grab driver during pickups will be a thing of the past with the inclusion of the “Live Location Sharing” feature.

This feature gives passengers the option to share their live location with their assigned drivers if they are unsure of their exact location, making it easier for them and the drivers to find each other.

Apart from that, Grab has added other elements such as back-to-back bookings and auto-acceptance to further increase productivity and reduce downtime.

Consecutive bookings make switching from one trip to the next easier by finding the next reservation for drivers before they even complete their current trip.

Meanwhile, auto-accept minimizes the chances of driver partners losing incoming assigned reservations by automatically accepting incoming rides on their behalf.

The Locations to Avoid feature ensures that drivers are not assigned any trips in those selected areas.

This increases efficiency and reduces downtime during peak periods, while increasing the number of trips driver partners can complete per hour online. Drivers can choose to disable this feature at any time.

Another additional feature is Allocation Swaps, which basically exchanges reservations on the back-end to assign the closest driver-partners to the passengers. This helps save time for both parties and reduces the time required for driver partners to complete each reservation.

Automatic tolling has also been added to the Grab platform that automatically populates and includes estimated toll prices in the final fare owed by the passenger. If the accumulated toll rates are inaccurate, drivers also have the option to edit the toll rates to the correct amount.

Finally, Grab included the Locations to Avoid feature that gives driver partners the option to choose a limited number of locations to avoid. This means that driver partners can choose to stay away from certain locations and will not be assigned any trips in those selected areas.

Grab’s Head of Product Fulfillment Prashant Kumar shared these new features during a virtual session titled “Driver Productivity in Southeast Asia” held on August 25.

It said that since the introduction of the new features and functions, there has been a 3.55% reduction in average driver downtime and a 10% increase in average online hourly earnings from 2021 to 2022. .

“To be the most reliable passenger transport platform, we must be prepared for a multi-event outcome; in fact, we are obsessed with it. These measures will reduce driving costs and improve the overall health of the market,” Prashant said.

“In the end, our goal is not to overwhelm the driver with too many options. That’s why we created features like Consecutive Bookings and Auto Accept.”

Grab currently operates in eight Southeast Asian countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.