You are a Product Manager at Ola. The CEO and co-founder wants to make Ola users more ‘loyal’ and increase the stickiness of users to the brand/product. He thinks it is time for Ola to become a larger part of the customer’s life. Your mission is to see his vision to completion.

Question

You are a Product Manager at Ola. The CEO and co-founder wants to make Ola users more ‘loyal’ and increase the stickiness of users to the brand/product. He thinks it is time for Ola to become a larger part of the customer’s life. Your mission is to see his vision to completion.

Come up with 3 features you think will help solve this and help Ola serve its users better, with an explanation of why and for whom they will solve the problem.

Asked at Ola over a year ago

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Devashish Chaturvedi · Answer 1 · 2022-07-01T11:58:06+0000

Do we need to introduce the features on the app or product level?

I will be framing my answer from the both the perspectives

The primary objective is to increase the customer retention and acquisition. Ola shouldn't only be a product but a brand for its customers.

The team can work on the following features-

BRAND WISE

1) Introduce Energy Efficient Vehicles

The new Genz as we say are very much concerned and aware about their surroundings and environment. Though a long term objective, but switching to an Evehicle or Hydrogen Powered vehicle system can help place Ola into an environment friendly and aware brand. People would love to associate with OLA.

2) Coach and Upskill

I believe the future is in India be it in tech or business. People from across the globe will be visitng here for variety of purposes. I believe here Ola can take the leverage their position of being a huge player. They can upskill their driver to be skilled in at least one foriegn language and be enough technically sound to facilitate and smoothen the experience people who will be coming here.

Training people coming from various ethinic, diversity and even gender background and facilitating their licence process can help OLA build their brand that promotes equality.

Eg-Providing traninig and job opportunities to people coming from the transgender community

PRODUCT WISE

There can be certain app wide features that can be introduced-

POWER USERS

Talking about the current scenario, people belonging to these group who travel on regular basis for office/business work are incurring a total monthly bill of 27-30k INR in a tier 1 city in India due to the surcharges and high fuel price. Moreover these people do have their own vehicle or the capacity to buy a new one. The cost of hiring a driver is 15-20k a month + fuel charges is roughly 6k. Maths clearly says that its viable to employ a driver instead of using OLA in the long run(Consideringvehicle EMI as well).

These are generally very loyal and crucial customers. Letting them switch to a substitute or leave is not a good idea.OLA should have more economic plans for these people. Better subscriptions on the basis of their ratings, avg revenue per ride,no of rides cancelled. This will help OLA retain the customers untill the market prices stabilises.

The ultimate goal should be to set up cost efficient subsidized EV vehicles.

INFREQUENT

This segment consists of the major chunk of customers and they dont have any preference. There are multiple factors that they consider while booking a cab like fare, no of cabs available, time of arrival etc. Although tough but we can create customer models to analyze at the minute level of their trip behaviour like what time they book the cabs, how frequent they book their cab. By giving them popups on their app of offers, discounts, nearest cab available(book in next 2 mins etc),multitude of options available might help OLA retain these customers and convert them into power if possible

RARE

Personally saying, I would use a very unconventional way to acquire new customers apart from the conventional ones.Would vouch for make in India association. Not sure how this concept will work but I have seen products using this sense of associating themselves to this Indian feeling and ultimately doing good

This is a very very unconventional way but writing this if someone can think of this more.

Zafeer Rais · Answer 2 · 2022-03-20T10:42:35+0000

Ola is a popular ridesharing/ridehailing company in India. It is commonly known as the Indian version of Uber. Ola users are the customers who make use of their services by booking cabs on the app.

Stickiness is defined as a ratio of DAU/MAU. Active users are those that perform some valuable activity on the platform. Hence, in order to increase the stickiness of the product, we have to ensure that the difference between DAU and MAU is as small as possible. The general rule is that a stickiness ratio of 20% is considered to be good.

Ola's mission statement is "to build mobility for a billion people". For the sake of this interview, we will focus on becoming a larger part of the user's life around mobility.

To improve stickiness we have to look at ways to increase user retention. Let us first look at the different types of users that use Ola:

1. Regular - These are loyal Ola customers who probably use it for their daily office commute and use Ola as the top medium of mobility. To increase the stickiness in this group, we can look at the following options:

Reward their loyalty with discounts and offers on the basis of their ride history. This will encourage the user to stick around with the product
Introduce weekend rides which will allow the users to use the services on non-work days as well. These could be leisure drives or weekend getaways
Come up with a subscription plan which is economically beneficial to the user and ensure that the user sticks around

2. Infrequent - These users are the ones who keep swinging between Ola and the competition and don't use Ola on a regular basis or for daily commute

To get the users from the competition, it is important to provide better services as compared to the competition. Doing an NPS survey would help us identify where the users lie.
These could be also be users who have their own means of mobility and use Ola to avoid driving in traffic, airport rides, etc. We could retain these users by integrating with Google maps, which could suggest there is traffic and it is better and sometimes even cheaper to use Ola owing to parking and other costs. Integrations and partnerships can also be done with travel apps which would suggest flight bookings and offer an Ola to users at the time of the flight.

3. Rare - These are the users who rarely use the application. This might be due to the fact that either they don't move around much or find Ola too expensive. We can retain these users through the following options:

Introduce Ola buses, which allows users to share a bus with others on designated routes which can be highly cost effective
Ola money can be used to pay various bills on the application like electricity, fuel, train, etc.

PS: I have intentionally not used a lot of the other Ola services which are already live like Ola self drive. Also, the purpose of this answer is to increase the DAU, hence, not looking for luxury services which may not help solve the original question asked.