Cabify Launches Innovative Virtual Assistant

Cabify, Spain’s successful ride-hailing service, recently launched its own virtual assistant.

As one of Spain’s biggest startup success stories, Cabify is rapidly becoming the go-to ride-hailing service for people in cities across Spain and Latin America.

Cabify offers taxis, executive cars, electric scooters, and even helicopters for hire through its mobile app.

In the last few weeks, the company has also introduced delivery services to help get food and packages where they need to be during the widespread lockdowns.

Why Did Cabify Implement a Virtual Assistant?

According to Jacobo Dominguez, Cabify’s Vice President of Customer Experience and Operations:

“Our mission is to make cities a better place to live, and we do that by offering an alternative to the private car – a quality and safe option for our customers. By customers, I mean both drivers and riders, who are all customers to us.”

Cabify found that while there were high volumes of driver applicants, there was a significant drop-off during the onboarding process, where potential new drivers had to submit documents.

So, they wanted to introduce a chatbot that could guide them through their background checks and registrations, as well as provide an open channel for support once they were verified and on the road.

For riding customers, Cabify wanted to provide a simple way to deliver customer service.

To start with, it only offered support via email, which meant vital support interactions could take too long – especially if a customer had lost an item during a journey or needed to report an issue.

Cabify needed a solution that would support all of its customers – both drivers and riders – across a range of channels and geographies.

It was also critical that the conversational virtual assistant could integrate across its own app, a variety of social media channels, and a range of countries to give customers and drivers the widest choice of how to engage.

Creating Their Virtual Assistant

Using Nuance’s conversational AI technology, Cabify was able to do all of this while also establishing a roadmap for the future. In November 2019, Cabify went live with their virtual assistant “ABI”.

After initial success, the Nuance–Cabify partnership continued to work to improve the experience for drivers and customers.

“We are in eleven countries and the ways people speak and spell in each of these countries differ,” says Maria Gili, Global Customer Experience and Ops Technology Manager.

“So we needed to train ABI in a way that would adapt to all of our countries. This was something that Nuance was able to provide for us and has helped us achieve.”

As Cabify looks to the future, Dominguez explains that ABI plays a central role in creating a digital customer experience, serving as the company’s “first face” with the customer.

Cabify will continue to expand training for ABI, much like any other agent working for the company.

Author: Robyn Coppell