What a Southeast Asian ride-share company can teach US businesses about customer service
Hanoi, Vietnam, is a second home to me. Recently, I returned after nearly three COVID-filled years away.
The city is more crowded now. Three years ago, the cars-to-motorbike ratio was about 30% to 60%. This visit, it seems to have reversed — about 60% of the vehicle traffic is cars, the balance motorbikes. That means, of course, traffic jams are bigger, longer and more stressful than ever.
On the other hand, seeing old friends and colleagues, learning about new worlds (art crime!), and eating Vietnamese food every chance I could, made the trip magical. (I think, over the course of a week, I had Vietnamese food at every meal, including breakfast, except for two meals – Italian and Japanese). Heaven.
I also had a marvelous customer-service experience. A Malaysian-based shared car firm called Grab shoved Uber out of the Hanoi market four or five years ago. It’s only gotten better since. Each of the cabs (very small ones, though) was timely and ran air conditioning, and all the drivers wore masks. (So did I). After one trip to an office meeting, I realized that my hotel key (the credit card type) had fallen out of my pocket, probably in the cab. I figured I could replace it and didn’t really worry.
During my meeting, though, maybe 10 minutes after we arrived, my phone rang from a Vietnamese number. I turned off the phone and continued the meeting.
After I left, I received an email. Over the next hour or so, we had this exchange:
“Dear Ms. Nancy,
Your driver discovered a lost item. Please let me know if you lost an item and we will put you in touch with your driver.”
“Yes, indeed,” I wrote back. “I lost a hotel key. Thank you for offering to connect me with the driver.”
“You are right. The lost item was a hotel key. Here is a way to connect your driver, who does not speak English so you will need help to talk to him. He will bring the item to you.”
By then, I’d returned to the hotel and retrieved a new key. But I was impressed with the service.
How would Uber handle a lost item? I wondered. Maybe some of you have gone through this with Uber, but I have not, so I Googled “How to retrieve a lost item from an Uber car?”
The answer was something like this:
The customer should contact the driver. (So I guess I always need to keep track of that in the future).
Contact the driver, make a plan for where to meet the driver to collect the item. (I go to the driver, the driver doesn’t come to me).
Pay $15 to get your item back. (No charge with Grab).
Different approaches to be sure.
I’m sure there are many reasons for the differences (perhaps staff shortages, plus Grab may still be building a market), but I was impressed.
Always looking for what I can learn from other places and countries. Mark another one for Vietnam.
Nancy Napier is a distinguished professor emerita and coach for the executive MBA program in the College of Business and Economics at Boise State University in Idaho. nnapier@boisestate.edu. She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”
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