Taking the app route

The rollout of a mobile booking app is helping radio taxi major Meru stay ahead in the race. By Mehak Chawla

Innovation often becomes a necessity for a company trying to balance growth with its infrastructural upgrades. Similar was the case of Meru Cabs, the much renowned operator of the olive green vehicles. With over 6,000 cabs in 5 cities, Meru is the largest radio taxi operator in the country today. Over the years, the company has been devising fresh and hassle free ways for customer bookings. Be it their in-house developed GPS system or handing over PDAs to drivers, the focus on travel technology has been a given for Meru. The most recent technology addition to their arsenal is their mobile application.

Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cabs, details the tech gene of the company. “Our key aim behind launching the phone application was facilitating easy bookings. When Meru started operations, we became pioneers in the call center booking mechanism. However, as volumes grew, we realized that customers had to face long and cumbersome call queues for booking a cab. And since it was impossible for us to scale our call center so quickly, we started evaluating other options.”

It was back in 2010 that Meru began taking online bookings through their ‘real-time’ website. “We integrated the site with our back-end systems, so we were the first ones in the industry checking availability and taking bookings in real-time,” explains Sangoi.

A couple of years back, Meru started contemplating on how they could use the mobility wave that has gripped India. As a result, they started thinking about taking their first steps in the mobility space. However, at that point in time, it was difficult to ascertain any leaders in the mobile handset and Operating System (OS) space. Nokia had begun its decline, and Android was catching up, while iOS remained for the elite. “So back then, we decided to work on something that worked across platforms. We figured that different solutions for different handsets will result in support and cost issues at our end,” says Sangoi.

As a result, about a year and a half back, Meru came up with a mobile site based on HTML5. The site would work for any phone with Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) capability as well as on smart phones. “It was tightly integrated with our core system which could detect whether the request was coming from a feature phone or a smart phone and respond accordingly,” elaborates Sangoi.

However, some time later, clear winners started emerging in the mobility space, both in terms of market share as well as stability. It was then that Meru started thinking about building native applications for different platforms. Native applications are not only lighter, but can also inculcate more features and provide quick and easy booking options to customers.

The app journey
Since Meru already knew, through device fingerprinting, what OS were their customers primarily using, they decided to start with mobile applications for iOS and Android. Meru’s core systems like dispatch, GPS and GPRS based maps have all been built in-house. For their mobile applications, they adopted a hybrid approach where their in-house tech team worked with their IT partners for building, testing and deploying the application on both the platforms.

The application development process, which began early in 2013, scaled several levels like coding, design, quality assurance, testing and finally implementation and integration. While they had separate teams for coding for both the platforms, given their distinct requirements, Sangoi says they decided to have common teams for design to give a unifying experience across platforms. “While we adhered to all guidelines and design standardizations, we worked on providing an identifying and integrated experience for all customers across all platforms.” The quality assurance and implementation teams also remained common.

“Apart from enabling quick booking through maps, home/office tags or previous trips, the app also allows customers to track the cab on the map while it is approaching the customer or while reaching the destination. The customers can also get e-receipts and rate the services,” explains Sangoi.

Meru has also inculcated a feature called “Ice”, which is short form for ‘In case of an emergency’ in its mobile app to distinguish itself and also enhance security for travelers. According to Sangoi “Ice Alert option that one can avail in an emergency situation is a value added service offered by Meru, specially designed keeping in mind the safety of Meru customers. Through this service one can alert family members or friends in case of an emergency and receive help as soon as possible.” A customer who wishes to avail this service would have to feed in two contact numbers of family or friends, who will be alerted as soon as the ‘Alert’ option is selected. They will also be able to view the exact location of the person for 30 minutes. This service can be used by anyone, and is not restricted to customers traveling by Meru.

Challenges en route
The coding process for these mobile applications, according to Sangoi, was relatively hassle free. It was in the testing and deployment stage that the surprises sprung up. “Even though Apple has more stringent standards for applications on its App store, and the application also takes longer to go live, we found testing relatively smooth since we had to test only for 2-3 devices,” he reveals.

Testing on Android, on the other hand, proved to be a huge challenge, even though the process for getting the application online is simpler on Android. However, Android encompasses a huge gamut of devices by several OEMs, having different features and functionality. “For the Android app, a lot of customers gave us feedback about things that were not working on a particular handset etc. We fixed some problems via subsequent updates based on customer feedback,” Sangoi says. It were the intermittent errors that took longer to identify and then fix, he adds.

Meru first released their Android app and followed it up with the iOS app a couple of weeks later. The Android app is currently running in its 1.0.7 version while the iOS is in 1.0.3 version. The application seen over 80,000 downloads within the first month of its launch.
As far as the load on their back-end infrastructure is concerned, Sangoi explains that the beauty of native apps is that most of the stuff remains on the consumer device itself. The mobile applications are hosted in the public cloud that also hosts the Meru website. Needless to say, there is a very tight integration between their web and application platforms, in order to provide real-time bookings to customers.

Also, as per Sangoi, a great benefit of these mobile platforms are that they send crash reports to application developers. “So we know how many times has our application crashed, on what platform and device and we can fix it accordingly.”

After seeing a fair number of downloads in a relatively short time-span, Meru is now planning to enhance its mobile applications portfolio. “We are planning to come up with additional features and also developing an app for Windows phones, which are gaining popularity. We are also optimizing our application for iPad,” says Sangoi.

“As of now, about 14% of our bookings are coming through the mobile. However, it’s only been a month and we expect this number to increase in the coming few months,” he sums up.