For all the convenience ride-hailing apps in Indonesia bring, they all have one glaring flaw – customers and drivers have to contact each other via means external to the apps (i.e. calls or SMS) to clarify or confirm their order, often at the expense of their phone credit, which is locally known as pulsa.
Grab is the first ride-hailing app to tackle the problem with GrabChat, a feature that facilitates driver-passenger chat within the Grab app itself. More importantly, it’s free to use and does not take away anyone’s pulsa (maybe just a minuscule amount of internet quota).
“This will ease and quicken the pick up process for both passenger and driver… without the need to spend pulsa,” Grab Co-Founder Hooi Ling Tian wrote in a statement released yesterday, as picked up by Kompas.
The company ran a beta test for GrabChat on 50,000 app users over the past week. They noted that the chat feature managed to save the cost of 85,000 text messages from drivers and 45,000 text messages from passengers.
GrabChat is rolling out in South East Asia throughout this week and will be available in Grab’s newest app update for both Android and iOS users.
Reader Interactions