About Re Serve
The RE Serve is an application that provides transport service for commuters via local Bajaj RE three-wheeled vehicles in various cities of the Philippines.
The three-wheeled vehicles often referred to as tuk-tuk is quite popular in the Philippines. Many of the local people use it as their mode of transport for the daily commute in the city. There are around 3.5 million three-wheeled vehicles in the Philippines.
The Re Serve recently featured in Coleen’s world Vlog which is a popular YouTube Vlog channel in the Philippines. Apart from that it also got featured in the DZRH News Television, which is one of the leading news channels in the Philippines.
Re Serve officially launched in Feb 20, 2020, and started offering below three types of services.
Special service
In this service, the commuters can book the three-wheeled vehicle with a maximum occupancy of 5. The fares are subjected to vary as per the city.
Tourist service
This service allows the tourists to go around the city on an hourly-based fare.
REDala
It’s a courier service of RE Serve in which the customers can deliver their important parcels within the same city.
The main objective of the RE Serve program is to increase the awareness of Bajaj Re vehicles among the people of Antipolo and Tagaytay city.
Challenges
Different configuration for different cities
Our client had its cab services spread in the multiple cities of the Philippines. Moreover, they wanted to keep different configurations in different cities. For example, they wanted to keep different pricing, offers, commission rates, and many other parameters as per their will.
Change in the flow
Another major change that our client wanted was to change the flow of the booking process. Generally, when the rider books a cab, he selects the cab service type and then selects the type of vehicle. However, RE Serve wanted to make a change in this flow.
They wanted the user to select the vehicle type first and then the cab service type. Notably, RE Serve offered two cab service viz. taxi and rental. So, according to their flow, the rider must choose the type of cab from RE and tricycle and then he will get the option of rental and taxi.
Introducing booking fees to the ride fare
The third major challenge of our client was to introduce the concept of booking fees. In simple terms, the booking fee is nothing but a commission charge that has to be paid by the rider. Earlier, this wasn’t the case.
For example, if the rider pays $100 to the driver at the end of the ride and the commission rate for the driver is 20%, then $20 will be deducted from the driver’s wallet. So, the net earning of the driver will be $80. However, with booking fees in place, the rider will have to pay $120 to the driver. The additional $20 paid by the rider is the booking fee. The commission amount will be still deducted from the driver’s wallet; however, his net earning would be $100 for that ride.
Solution
Company and its operational areas
To solve the first challenge, we created various operational areas under one company. The operational areas function as a sub-companies under one main company.
All these operational areas had the same configuration as that of the main company. The admin of the main company can log into any of the other operational areas but the vice-versa is not possible.
With this, the client enjoys the flexibility of keeping different parameters in different cities like pricing, commission rate, services, promotional offers, and many more.
Earlier, when there were no operational areas, we had hardcoded to the two-vehicle types in the main company. Now, when there was a requirement for the operational area, we had hard code those two vehicle types in each operational area. However, this increased complication.
To resolve this issue, we took the help of the rider’s pick up location. We identified from which operational area the request was coming from. After identifying the operational area, we guided the user with user experience flow of that particular operational area.
Change in flow of user experience
First, we checked the RE tag of the vehicle and then checked what services are available on that RE tag.
To change the flow of the user experience, we had to make several changes. First, we had to maintain all the records locally. We had to ensure that whenever the user selects the RE then he should get two options viz. taxi and rental. Similarly, when the rider chooses Tricycle then he must only get the option of the taxi. To implement this we had to call an API once the user selects the vehicle type to determine the services available for that vehicle type.
Moreover, this flow also resulted in an additional step. Once the rider selects the service type he would again see the vehicle type that he has already selected before. Along with that, he would see the booking now option and the estimated fare. This whole step was an additional step that we had to accommodate the user experience flow.
Introduced booking fees
We had to update our entire pricing algorithm based on the configuration. We added a configuration that decides whether to add the commission into the total amount or not. Moreover, we also had to make changes to the receipt, fare breakdown, and every other place that shows payment details.
Aftermath
With the Yelowsoft’s robust taxi solution, RE Serve was able to launch its cab services with a boom. They witnessed an upward trajectory in the number of rides as the days passed. After achieving success in their first few cities, they are now aiming to expand their services to all the major cities of the Philippines.
