Interview: TaxiForSure bets big on Data Sciences to fight competition

India’s taxi market, which is worth almost $9 billion, is one of the fastest growing markets in the country that has been getting a lot of attention from global investors. One of the major players in the taxi aggregation market TaxiForSure, which was recently acquired by its bigger rival Ola Cabs for $200 million, sees this business majorly driven by technology. In an interview with Firstpost, TaxiForSure’s Chief Technology Officer Amitava Ghosh shares how technology is the backbone of the company’s operations. Data Science seems a big factor for TaxiForSure in improving customers experience as well as generating more business for service providers. Excerpts: Every company has started calling themselves as “technology” company. How true is this for TaxiForSure? What role does technology play in your business? Technology is vital to the transportation industry as it has impacted the entire ecosystem and enables to move the business model forward. In our industry, if you look at into a simple flow of a cab taking you to from point A to point B, besides the fact that you are inside the car, everything else around it is driven by technology. Just like Flipkart offers a platform where a seller is connected to a buyer, TaxiforSure is also a marketplace where a service provider is connected with a rider. Given that analogy, the whole experience from requesting a service to getting it fulfilled, payment, settlement, everything is powered by technology. It is a service that is fulfilled by off network, but starting from the booking, getting people onboard, customer aggregation fullfillment everything is driven by technology. From that angle, Taxiforsure can be called a technology company. [caption id=“attachment_2149715” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Amitava Ghosh has resigned from TaxiForSure[/caption] With fierce competition in the cab aggregation market, how does Taxiforsure plan to conquer this space using technology? All our competitors are technology enabled. A seller goes to a platform that offers enough demands for their products and services; while on the consumer side, if you feel this particular platform covered my travel needs and I get a cab when I need it, and then you will also come to this platform. So, our focus is why as a seller to maximise his revenues, and by maximising their revenue means that we are telling them where the demands are coming from, where you are supposed to go, we are telling them this is our repeat customer, and so on. We are continuously giving them lot of demands that comes through our multiple channels of call centre, apps, and website. And, data collection plays a crucial role in scaling up the business and that is where Data Sciences comes in. As long as we are generating demand and using our Data Sciences properly to maximise the business and revenue for our partners (which is our drivers and operators), and at the same time fulfilling our customer’s demand through the multi-channel booking, that is going to be our USP. What kind of technologies do you use within your company? In which area of TaxiForSure’s operations is tech being beefed up at present? Technology is everywhere. But, the most amount of technology goes into something, called a ‘Core Engine’ in our system – which is booking and dispatching. This is the system where a customer comes with a request for a taxi and it is the same system that determines which is the taxi that needs to be sent. It’s not as simple as it looks. The simple dropdown tool that customers use from app and website is backed by Data Science. All patterns and predictions like from where most demands will come from, time, etc. are also driven by this technology. But, sometimes every calculation can go off the ground, so you need to have real-time analytics on top of it to take a stock on how far are we from the prediction, so that we can reset the expectations etc. All these algorithms of a cab dispatch, confirmation of a booking is backed by a strong prediction and the real-time analytics engine. Each city behaves differently. Data Sciences help us analyse the cab density, approximate traffic time, demand. So, all these operational efficiency parameters are backed by Data Sciences. To stay ahead of the curve, how Taxiforsure is using technology uniquely or what unique technologies the company is using? Every cab services provider are using app today. The point is even if a competitor has an app, but if my prediction engine is better and I can convincingly confirm your reservation and the cab shows up, that’s the difference in experience. So, if you talk about simply featured by features, we do it today our competition will come up tomorrow. At times we will be ahead and at times we will lag, but by feature-to-feature wise we will be the same. It is the core algorithm, analytics, and Data Sciences that makes the experience different for customers. And, moving forward, this is going to be one of our main USP. Also, there’s lot of work going on in making your billing and wallet experiences rock solid. In a taxi business, one of the major things that worry us all the time is during the trip while we are calculating your fare or distance, you are continuously using network. What happens when the connection is lost to the server? That’s when the algorithms decides and at the end of the day attributes to the overall customer experience. These technologies are going to be a differentiator in the longer run. Can you tell us about the investments that have been made across areas in the company on the tech front? We are a technology company. Besides the hardware, we rarely buy any technology from outside. We have around 1500 employees, out of which 80 are technology talent – which makes our product engineering analytics team. Many of them are from premium institutes like IITs, IIMs and top-notch engineering institutes; also there are experienced people who have worked with renowned companies like Yahoo, Adobe etc. We invest in right people. At the end of the day it’s talent acquisition that matters in our business. What percentage of business TaxiForSure is generating through mobile? Mobile has become significant. More than 50 percent of our business comes from mobile apps. Do you also look at tech acquisitions to be competitive? Yes, if someone has a cool technology and which can give our platform a boost. Many times there are exclusive tie ups and acqui-hires, we are always open to such acquisitions. Post acquisition, what change can we expect at TaxiForSure, technology wise? We are going to run our own operations independently. Nothing changes, our roadmap, technology stand remains the same. But being in a big company, you are always going to exchange expertise to make each other’s product strong, as well as learn from each other. We expect lot of collaborative thinking in terms of the technical architecture, scalability, and Data Sciences between these two companies.   [Note: Amitava Ghosh has resigned from TaxiForSure.]