Over the years, the Grab app has evolved to become the go-to place for people to book rides, order food, and buy groceries anytime of the day.

With more functions and orders to be fulfilled, a plethora of driver-partners and delivery-partners are always on the ground, seeing to these jobs.

That makes them active users of the Grab Driver app.

This effectively also makes the partners the best people to give feedback on how the system can be improved, having navigated the ins and outs of the app exhaustively and repeatedly.

This is where Lee Ping Yuen, Grab's Head of Supply Strategy, Mobility, comes in.

His role is to listen and see to the needs of driver-partners to make their lives better, by first making the app more friendly, useful, and intuitive.

A team that listens to driver-partners

Lee, or even his team’s role, is not well-known or documented.

The common public perception is that feedback to any organisation goes into a black hole, never to be seen again.

But at Grab, drivers’ feedback, good or bad, eventually falls into Lee's lap.

His job is akin to being a listener — taking in complaints and feedback by speaking to partners face-to-face over coffee, communicating with them over text messages, and even having complaints and feedback relayed to him or his team members by word-of-mouth.

Partners like to communicate in different ways when they are done being on the road and Lee will make time and space to accommodate the feedback.

He and his team even spends time on social media to observe the chatter, as they can be indicative of the gripes that partners have and the common problems they face on the job.

And all those in-app messages and survey forms that partners provide responses for?

Yup, they find their way to him and his team.

He even turns to internal data and checks in with other teams on the frontlines, such as Grab’s partner engagement and relations team and Grab Service Centre to verify the problems if he needs to make sense of what is happening.

The feedback is then channelled to the product teams, who make the necessary changes to develop features on the app that address the feedback and improve driver experience.

Grab's 'Instant Cashout' goes against industry norms

And the outcomes have been tangible.

One highly-lauded feature has been the “Instant Cashout” function introduced in 2017 that allows driver-partners to transfer their earnings to their bank accounts up to twice per day.

Lee said: “Before we introduced this, it was an industry norm for driver-partners to wait several days for their earnings to be transferred to their bank accounts. This limits our partners’ cash flow, which can be challenging for some of those requiring immediate liquidity for their essential expenses.”

With “Instant Cashout”, partners can pay for their essential expenses, including bills or school fees as and when they have to, which takes a load off them knowing they can meet payment deadlines and not worry about incurring late fees or hefty repayment interests.

Lee, who has been with Grab for close to seven years, said: “It was a feature borne out of drivers’ feedback and was meeting a real driver need."

Having started out as a member of the “Partner Care” team, the role these days has evolved to focus on engaging Grab's driver-partners, by understanding and building programmes that best address their everyday needs.

As for Lee, his job scope now is more specialised to ensure that Grab keeps its driver-partners happy, productive, and engaged.

He has personally seen multiple changes to the app since its very early iterations implemented for the betterment of partners and as a result of feedback.

Continuous improvement of features

And the betterment of the app has been continuing and a constant work in progress.

Lee added that there exists intractable problems that the app is still trying to solve, mainly because of "a small number of individuals" who will choose not to adhere to the rules.

An example would be when passengers with children, who insist on travelling on the JustGrab service to avoid the additional charge that comes with GrabFamily service.

The GrabFamily service comes with the availability of a booster seat, and trained partners who know the right way of securing young children with the child seats available in their vehicles.

It enables both drivers and passengers to be compliant to Singapore’s Road Traffic Act that mandates children under 1.35m tall must be strapped into an approved Child Restraint System (CRS) when travelling in a vehicle.

Grab scholarship & bursaries

Besides improvements in the app, Lee has witnessed first-hand how partners have benefitted from other programmes initiated by Grab.

Lee said one of the most memorable experiences he has had was during the Grab Scholarship and Bursaries events.

He said: "We hear very often from our driver-partners that they toil the roads for the sake of their children. This is also the reason why we introduced the Emerald Circle Scholarships and Bursaries."

"Seeing how our driver- and delivery-partners care for their families, their positive attitude, and the gratitude their children have for their parents’ hard work really tugs at the heartstrings. In fact, I do notice that many of our partners’ children are a lot more appreciative of their parents’ work than they imagined."

This article was brought to you by Grab, which has also brought you food, rides and groceries.

Top image courtesy of Grab.