Nuance Helps Cabify Manage Growing Customer Requests

Cabify, a ride-hailing company akin to Uber and Lyft, with operations in Spain and throughout much of Latin America, quickly became a success story in a fledgling industry.

The company, which is based in Spain, underwent rapid expansion last year and expects to continue growing. With such ambitious plans, it soon became necessary to offload simple contact center calls so agents could focus on the most difficult ones.

“We needed an additional way to reach out to our customers and our drivers outside of our ticketing system. We needed something that was scalable and flexible,” recalls Maria Gili Mas, global customer operations technology manager at Cabify. “We needed something that could answer communications coming in from different channels, from different countries, and in different languages.”

The search for a solution started early in 2019. Cabify didn’t have to look far. Jacobo Domínguez Blanco, Cabify’s vice president of customer experience and operations, worked with Nuance Communications in a previous job at Telefonica, so he was aware of the technology company’s capabilities.

Cabify made the agreement with Nuance official in March 2019, opting for its Intelligent Engagement Platform and advanced conversational artificial intelligence. Custom development and middleware integration took about four months, and in July 2019, Cabify introduced “Abi,” its own virtual assistant, to manage customer requests and questions in several languages. Abi can answer riders’ and drivers’ queries quickly, all in customers’ native languages and dialects across digital social media channels like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

“In the mobility market, being able to provide fast and efficient customer service is critical, and it is imperative that end-users and drivers can get direct responses to their concerns quickly, using the channels they are most comfortable with. Nuance has helped us achieve this with its conversational AI capabilities,” Blanco said in a statement shortly after the system went live. “With the deployment of our virtual assistant, we’ve been able to move away from traditional channels, automating the process of responding to customer queries. As well as getting faster feedback, customers have benefited from the more efficient use of our human agents, who are now freed up to tackle more complex or personalized requests.”

Abi “is solving as many tickets on WhatsApp as nine human agents from our contact center would solve in one month,” says Gili Mas. “This represents 13 percent of the agents we currently have working on the onboarding process.”

The onboarding process is particularly tricky and time-consuming, she adds. Depending on the country, drivers need to upload a variety of documents for the initial contractor arrangement and ongoing work. And, like Uber and Lyft, Cabify has significant driver turnover. Abi can guide drivers through the most common questions while advancing drivers with complex issues to human agents for additional help.

Abi has already resulted in faster customer communications, with 80 percent of end-user requests being resolved on first contact. Additionally, Abi correctly recognizes the intent of 93 percent of requests.

Cabify is working with Nuance to expand Abi from WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to drivers’ and customers’ apps. There’s some additional internal technology integration before the expansion can occur, Gili Mas says.

Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance’s Enterprise Division, welcomes the opportunity. “Our goal is to help organizations free their employees to be their best selves, delivering strategic outcomes for their businesses, and we’re delighted to be able to help Cabify do just that,” he said in a statement. “As a company with ambitious growth plans, Cabify has placed the customer experience at the heart of this expansion, something we absolutely believe is the right decision.” 

The Payoff

With "Abi," an intelligent virtual assistant built on Nuance Communications' Intelligent Engagement Platform, Cabify has been able to do the following: 

• answer as many WhatsApp onboarding queries as nine human agents (about 13 percent of the total);
• handle the Facebook Messenger ticket workload of three agents;
• resolve 89 percent of WhatsApp tickets for which it has been trained;
• resolve 80 percent of end-user requests on first contact; and
• recognize the intent of 93 percent of requests and route them appropriately.