Driving CSR engagement at Uber

 
 

Uber Case Study

By Christina Sri

Background

Uber started as a ride-hailing app in 2009; today it is arguably the world’s largest transportation service with drivers in over 750 cities in 65 countries around the world. I joined Uber’s support team in July 2014 during a period of immense growth. 

Because of the massive growth, Uber’s support organization needed a complete paradigm shift. We moved the organization from a high-touch and localized support model—where every metro owned their support process—to a fully standardized and global model. 

When I joined Uber, most of our time was spent classifying support tickets, categorizing issues into tiers, and designing standard practices for resolving issues. Like many global organizations, the ultimate goal for efficiency was to offshore easy-to-resolve tickets then hire specialized support agents in the US to address complex issues. In the meantime, however, Uber was flooded with tens of thousands of tickets per day, and many of the issues were highly complex. They needed an interim solution.

Challenge

Locally organized support teams, made up of full-time employees, were no longer financially viable for Uber. In order to handle the increasing load of tickets, we reached out to a third-party vendor who hired Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) on a contract basis. Our vendor handled sourcing and hiring; my role (part of a team of Community Operations Managers) was to manage these CSRs and ensure they met their performance goals. 

CSRs are not fully engaged

One issue that immediately came to light was CSR engagement. When they are hired, CSRs are excited about the prospect of working for a high growth company with a lot of buzz. Many contractors saw this position as a “foot-in-the-door” for an eventual full-time role. The reality was that our rapid growth meant fewer full-time hires in the long term. Because of many rapidly shifting variables, it was challenging to give CSRs a clear answer on headcount. Even as managers, we just didn’t know.

“Many of these contractors saw this position as a “foot-in-the-door”

This led to CSRs feeling like “hired help” and undervalued. It was a recurring theme in team meetings and one-on-ones. It led to high turnover and it was painful to rehire and train new CSRs. And we even discovered CSRs who cheated in order to make their quota numbers.

But our CSRs were critically important to the growth of Uber. I managed a team of CSRs and wanted to show them that we appreciated them as partners. We wanted to demonstrate how valuable their contributions were—even if they weren’t full-time employees. 

Solutions

Because of my background in content marketing, I decided to produce content for the entire CSR group to keep them engaged and help them feel part of a community.


Creating the dream team

I partnered with two Community Operations Managers, an internal content strategist, and importantly, I found two CSRs who wanted to volunteer to help. We decided on two deliverables: a monthly podcast and a weekly newsletter. We already sent out an internal communications email each week with policy and process updates for the CSRs, so we decided to spruce up the format to be more engaging.

Because the goal was the engage CSRs, we wanted to make sure that they had a voice in the process. Including CSRs in this task force helped them contribute ideas about what kind of content engaged them. It also helped me get to know them a little better.


Putting CSRs center stage

In the podcast, one of the Community Operations Managers would interview a different CSR from somewhere in the United States. This put our CSRs center stage and helped everyone at Uber get to know our CSRs a little better. We learned a lot about or CSR and they had many interesting lives outside their work: one was a voice actor, another a country singer. 

Driving performance through social proof

For my own team of 13 CSRs, I piloted a project that I hoped would drive engagement and improve performance. Ultimately, other managers at Uber adopted this same system.

Instead of going over performance numbers one by one every week, I created a leaderboard so CSRs could see their performance ranked against their peers. Each week at our team meeting, I would release the scores, announce the the top performers and offer accolades and prizes.

The top-performing CSRs would come to the team meetings to share their week’s most challenging tickets and how they solved them. I found that giving CSRs opportunities to take ownership in their work helped them take more pride in the job. And group sessions where they could share knowledge and collaborate, despite living in different cities, made them feel like more of a team. 

Lastly, I created a buddy program where I would pair top performers with lower performers so they could mentor them. 

Results

  • Launching the newsletter and podcast increased the open rate of our update emails to CSRs by 25%

  • Received positive feedback from ~50 of CSRs about the content, along with requests to be interviewed. 

  • The buddy system on my personal team helped improve low performer’s numbers by 25%.

  • Received positive feedback from team members around the leaderboard system and saw more engagement from team members with new team meeting format.