Ola Cabs is
currently a very popular cab/taxi aggregator service in India that
provides match making services between those looking for taxis and
those providing taxis. They have become popular due to the way they
have adopted technology to make the taxis available to people,
overturning companies like Fasttrack taxi and Wings Radio Cabs. These
other companies still continue to exist and operate, but a large
chunk of the taxi driver population has shifted loyalties to Ola cabs
and Uber as well. Uber does exactly what Ola does, only difference
being it is an american company that has started operations in India
now.
Now, in their
endeavour to keep up with superior competition like Uber, Ola has
adopted a technology aided approach to make your taxi ride a smoother
process. Going by this approach, and also believing that cash is a
messy mode of payment, for the past one and half years, they have
been offering a within-app wallet service called Ola Money, where you
prepay and store some money in your name in their account, and that
is digitally disbursed to the taxi driver you want to pay at the end
of your ride. No need to run around for change. The driver gets a
settlement on a per-day or per-week basis. In theory, this sounds
very rosy. But implementation is a different beast altogether.
In my observation of
using the Ola service coupled with the digital wallet feature, and
also in my interactions with some of the taxi drivers who ferry me
around the city, I have come to realise that in the name of having
agility in business decisions, Ola has become a company whose payment
policies can be as fickle as the human mind. Taxi drivers regularly
mention ever changing payment settlement policies, what with Ola
trying to factor in user feebback into payment disbursal and
penalizing drivers with lower ratings. While users are getting
accustomed to the convenience of not having to worry about exact
change, or running short of money to pay the taxi, the taxi drivers
are increasingly wary of taking digital payments because they are not
clear exactly how much money will come to their hands inspite of
running the taxi for the entire day. The average driver's expectation
is I get a customer, I ferry them around, I ought to get paid in full
for that. And when that fundamental logic in their mind doesnt match
up with reality due to constant churn of policy decisions, it puts
them in a spot. Result – A good number of drivers regularly ask for
cash payments, and some of them go to the extent of turning down taxi
bookings where customer may not pay in hard cash. And lacking a
practical view of real life scenarios, the Ola app doesnt give the
customer an option to choose the mode of payment when you keep money
in your Ola wallet.
You can read this
thread of tweets by blogger and techie Krish Ashok, and the many
responses to his tweet that will give you an idea of how the digital
wallet implementation of Ola lacks the angle of practicality to it. -
https://twitter.com/krishashok/status/740450772459130881
In August of 2015,
There have also been news reports about how the Ola APIs have been
built in a less than robust way, and about how some hackers have been
able to pilfer out personal information of various users. The
company subsequently claims to have plugged these loopholes and fixed
potential vulnerabilities.
As they say, it
takes a lot of vision, commitment and foresight to build a robust
business that creates a lifetime of value for itself and also for
people that depend on it. Hoping that Ola does the same, and not get
trapped in the cocoon of lopsided technology addiction and compulsive
need to sway to the commands of their fund masters.
