Ola Cabs - Organizational Excellence

Section E

Manisheel Gautam

Arnab Barua

Rajesh Ranjan

       Ola Cabs - A model of competitive Organizational Excellence

Ola has been a model of competitive excellence for the past two years, Overcoming external factors and competition both domestic and international players and has been the market leader in cabs industry in India by a considerable margin

ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

The environment Ola works is an unstable environment with frequent changes in government policies, customer preferences, evolving the industry and increasing threat from competitors.

The industry in which Ola operates is in a nascent phase, and there are severe supply problems for App-based aggregators to scale up. These issues have been tackled by the organization with supply marketing initiatives, getting more driver entrepreneurs on the road by helping with financing & licenses and creating a stable job for taxi drivers in the country.    On top of industry issues, Overcoming government regulatory hurdles have been an ongoing battle for the organization, which till now Ola has come out on top. Severe restrictions have placed by state governments and transport regulations1 have created problems for the organization to function efficiently. But a change in strategy and functioning by adapting to new rules and dialogues with stakeholders has helped overcome this problem.

The Customer behavior is very unpredictable in this industry driven by pricing and economy and brand. Ola countered this by creating a seamless experience for both their drivers and customers using an app to solve all problems and also by keeping prices affordable2 by scaling up numbers keeping revenue increasing for drivers to stay on the platform. Quality experience and seamless user experience had helped Ola retain customers and be the market leader even when competitors engaged in price wars. Radio Taxis and other App-based aggregators are major competitors3 for Ola. Working on quality both for drivers and customers has helped Ola negate the effect of measures taken by competitors and prevent the market from becoming a very price sensitive one.

ORGANIZATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Even though Ola was not the pioneer of App-based cab hailing, It was the one who introduced the concept to masses in India. First was building technology which would bring supply and demand on the same platform and then link them. Building a technology which could handle this scale of request on a variety of categories across 100 cities in India was a challenge in itself.

The technology changes have been huge from the start of the company in 2010 to present. From creating a system of bookings through call centers and website to moving to complete app-based booking. With the scale increasing from 10k bookings in July 2014 to a million rides4 a day at present. Apart from optimizing on app based bookings by changing booking radius, creating cross-selling and interchangeable categories to foraying into wallet technology5, thus creating a complete solution from seamless bookings to seamless payments for making travel hassle free for a customer who was used to kerb-side hailing and cash payments. The wallet enabled Ola to generate transactions on other platforms as well as increasing the retention rate of customers. The organization is achieving its goal of becoming mobility partner of the country through technology by creating categories catering to transport needs of the customers encompassing Inter and intra-city travel. On the Supply side which forms the crux of the business for the organization, there was optimization on driver App side. The technology was built for daily payments of every driver factoring in driver issues, penalties, cash and wallet payments. Tech was also built for tracking driver problems in real time and rectifying issues, Bringing Number masking6 and SOS button for safety all this helped in preventing inconvenience to customers