Grab also unveiled significant milestones in the company’s journey

Grab hiring

Grab riders who wish to flag down a GrabBike in Indonesia can now do so using a new feature called GrabNow.

This service, unveiled at Grab’s fifth year anniversary conference in Singapore, aims to digitise the street hailing experience. Riders will be able to leverage on all the same benefits offered by the Grab platform, including GrabPay option, upfront fixed fares and GrabRewards loyalty points.

To use this feature, a Grab rider taps on the street hailing option, which generates a pin code. The GrabBike driver then enters said pin code into their app and the ride is booked.

Rolling out this feature in Jakarta first makes perfect business sense, considering that the city’s GrabBike drivers usually congregate in small clusters and wait for riders to book rides. With GrabNow, a rider can simply walk up to a GrabBike driver nearby to book.

Additionally, Jakarta’s heavy traffic congestion makes it difficult to gauge how long a GrabBike will reach the rider; this sometimes results in rides getting cancelled. Using GrabNow, thus, lowers incidences of ride cancellation.

Improved telematics

When Grab first released its telematics initiative, it was used to track whether drivers were exceeding speed limits. Grab said it was able to achieve a 35 per cent reduction in speeding incidences after it sent reminders to drivers who were speeding.

Today, the telematics has been upgraded to monitor other indicators of safe driving behaviour, these include hard breaking, sudden acceleration and dangerous swerving.

Also Read: An inside look into the life of a Grab product manager, and what it takes to be an effective one

The telematics will collect all the data, and with machine learning and predictive analytics, identify those who exhibit dangerous driving behaviour. Reminders and messages will be sent to these drivers so that they can correct their behaviour.

This advanced telematics system will be first launched in Singapore.

Enhanced GrabChat

GrabChat has become an essential communication channel between Grab drivers and their riders. It contains template messages such as “I’m here” or “Ok coming over now” so that riders can quickly and easily inform drivers on their status.

Today, Grab has enhanced this feature by rolling out auto-translation of template messages in five languages (Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Simplified Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese), in order to cater to regional travellers.

Other significant Grab milestones

Unlike its chief rival Uber, which reported a US$708 million loss just a week ago, Grab said it is already “profitable in certain markets and verticals.” Grab reiterated that delivering the best customer service will continue to be its core focus and it is grateful to have the backing of investors who are in the long game.

Here are some other cool Grab facts that were presented at the fifth year a.

  • Grab traffic accident rates are 5 times lower than the regional average.
  • Grab driver-partners earn 32 per cent more on a per hour basis than an average worker
  • There are over 930,000 Grab driver-partners across all its markets.
  • There are 2.5 million daily rides booked.
  • Grab has logged over 45 million app downloads.

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Image Credit: Grab

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