RCA | Product Management | Cab-Hailing App | Drop in App/Play store rating 🙀

Objective: As a Product Manager for a cab-hailing app, need to determine the root cause for the drop in App/Play store rating from 4.5 to 3.8 in the last two weeks, also determine the solution for it.

Feedback is very important for building great products and one of the easy ways is through ratings. Generally for a mobile App be it Android or IOS we have a store from where we download the App and there the end-user(people who are downloading and using the app) are also able to rate the app based on their experience. Generally, it is on a scale from 0 to 5.

Below I would try to analyze and identify the problem to understand why App Store and Play Store ratings went down from 4.5 to 3.8 for a cab-hailing app.

Let’s dive in !!

Assumptions: Considering it to be a hypothetical case, below are the assumption made.

Demography: India
Platform: Mobile App(Android and IOS both)
Product Offerings: Driver App/ Rider App
A period in which decline was seen: Last 2 weeks

Note: Problem is seen in the riders app while booking a ride (IOS)

1.1

Customer Journey(User Journey) :

Let’s identify the problems which could be the cause for the downgrade in App/Play Store rating and find the possible solutions for them. (Assumptions)

Opening the App :

What could have gone wrong here?

1. The app might be crashing: The user must be trying to open the app but it closes suddenly or crashes in IOS(Assumptions). This is not seen in android though.

Solution: Informing the technical team regarding this and asking for a possible fix also QA needs to test it and then the dev needs to push the fix through hotfix to release(Emergency Release). We need to keep on monitoring for a few days after the patch is released.

Select pick up and drop location :

1. User location not captured properly: The user might be entering his/her location but the exact location of the user is not being captured rather it always points to a location a bit far away from the place.

Solution: The possible solution to this would be not only to track location using the cells locations service but to get the exact coordinates we can also use the GPS or other things along with it to get the exact coordinates of the user’s location. The technical team would need to work on this solution and based on feasibility further steps could be taken.

Select type of ride.. :

1. The app might not be showing the car name, or which class it belongs to (Prime sedan, mini, SUV).

2. App might fail to display the fare breakdown and km’s to be covered.

Solution :

1. Assuming there has been an update recently in this section(classification cabs) due to which car names and types are not showing. The dev and QA team need to fix the bug and go for an emergency release with the fix.

2. The fare breakdown can be elaborated more and showing the rate per km would be a good option as well and a proper breakdown would help users to make informed choices rather than a surprising one after the ride.

Select Payment Method :

1. Not giving an option to change payment method after the ride: Lacking such a feature of not allowing users not to change the payment method might disappoint riders.
2. Lack of few payment options: Not having convenient payment options like Wallets, which could be useful when bank servers are down.

Solution:

For both the above problem we can plan an enhancement in the payment product to allow such options to the users for a better experience.

Booking a cab

1. Not showing proper ride-related details: Ride-related details such as driver’s details, fare breakdown, and other information if not displayed properly, a rider might get confused or get a surprise bill after the ride. Also, OTP might not be getting displayed due to which rider has to off-board the ride even after confirming.

Solution: First we need to check if there has been any update in this particular screen by release notes and get the details on what changes were done in case of displaying details of the driver, ride details, and OTP.
Suppose if the fare breakdown is not properly displayed we can focus on showing a detailed breakdown including tolls, tax, separating out base fare and rate per Km.

Availing cab facilities

1. Facilities like AC/ Music were not made available(or not working) to the rider even upon request :
   The rider might have asked for AC/ Music but the driver might have declined the request, and this might have happened not only with one rider but many riders or it could be another way as well the AC or music player doesn’t even work due to which riders had a bad experience.

Solution:
The possible solution to this could be that management should set rules that before the driver accepts the ride, the cab should fulfill such basic requirement requirements. Also, a driver could be given a training module in the App itself to make them aware of these policies.

After ride online payment is failing

1. Payment is not getting successful/ payment is failing after ride :
   These could be issues on the payment page after the rider has completed the rider but the payment page might be showing some error/ online payments are failing.

Solution: To investigate such a problem we first need to check, since when these kinds of issues are reported by the rider by reviewing the Tickets, we can also check for release notes if there has been any update released recently for the payments page. The technical team needs to work on the fix and release an update of the fixed version(We would also need to monitor it for a few days after the fix has been provided).

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