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Ride-hailing app Ola has stepped on the gas with a bouquet of personalised features for both customers and driver partners on Ola Play, its connected car platform available on Ola Prime.
Launched in November 2016 with a vision of creating an entirely new back-seat experience for customers during commutes, Ola Play now greets customers when they board the car, addressing them by their first names; automatically starts playing songs that they like based on their past choices; intuitively lowers the volume of the music if the customer receives a phone call; making the commute a pleasant experience.
Personalised features
These personalised features are now available in 50,000 Ola Play cars across eight cities including Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Kolkata and Nagpur.
“With average ride timing in India hovering between 45 and 55 minutes, we wanted to make that time meaningful to our customers,” said Ankit Jain, Vice-President and Head of Ola Play. “For some customers that would mean catching up on the news, catching up on their favourite live TV shows, watching movies and for others it could mean getting access to Wi-Fi to catch up on their work — all of which we offer in our Ola Play cars. Now, we are making that experience far more personal. For instance, if the customer books a cab late at night, the car greets him by name and says ‘it looks like you have had a long day at work, let me turn on some music for you.’”
Customer feedback
These features were introduced after feedback from customers who wanted a five-star cab experience where the chauffeur greets the rider, from not wanting to waste time thinking of what music they want to listen to, and so on.
Ola is currently working on making commutes more productive by enabling video-calling on the back-seat screen, while customers continue to work on their laptop or mobile phone; enabling access to emails and calendar, for which it is partnering with Microsoft.
For driver partners, who spend 8-12 hours in the car every day, the entire ride-sharing software stack has been enabled on the high-end computer that is installed in Ola Play cars, so the driver’s smartphone is not required to accept bookings. It enables the driver to navigate not just to the customer location for pick-up, but also to points of interest that are relevant to the driver — public restrooms, places of worship, affordable places to eat like Amma Canteen, Indira Canteen; car maintenance workshops, etc.
“We have mapped information on various points of interest that will make life easy for drivers. On the food side, we have started experimenting with pre-ordering food, so it will be ready or packed to eat along the way, when the driver reaches. Drivers are using all these features even during holidays when they are with family,” said Jain.
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