Emil Michael explains how Uber's 5-star rating system directly tied driver bonuses and platform eligibility to their ratings. A low rating, like 3 stars for not opening a car door, triggered anonymous feedback that pushed drivers to improve. Rider complaints about odor or rudeness gave Uber data to coach drivers or remove underperformers.
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Quick question. In the early days, the drivers, the supply side, can you think of an example where you wanted to change their behavior, influence the way they were, like, say, used to doing something, quote, the old way? You're trying to get them to do it the new way, and you had to either, like, enforce it or maybe incentivize it. Does anything jump to mind?
Well, the, the star system that we had, 5 stars, was a very effective— people forget how, how people, how much that was part of Uber's brand promise in the beginning and how we use that to either coach drivers to be better, to, to take them off the system, to reward them for having so many 5-star trips in a row. And consumers took them seriously. Now, mostly you walk out of an Uber, you have 5 stars, you don't even think about it. In the beginning, people took this stuff really seriously, and it was a really valuable indicator of what we could do. So let's say, um, the driver, you know, um, you know, in an Uber Black didn't open the door for a customer, right? Back in the day, the customer would say that was 3 stars, and we tried to get as much as we could to say why. He's like, well, he didn't close the door for me. So then we say to the driver anonymously, you'd do better if you close the door for people in your star rating, right? And they cared about their star ratings because that entitled them to certain bonuses and, you know, certain classes of achievements, so to speak. So, we definitely use that system along with money and rewards, psychic rewards, financial rewards to try to change behavior. Among drivers. And look, people complain, oh, the, the car didn't smell good. It smelled like those, those trees that are too strong and too much cologne. I mean, you name it, riders will tell you what's happening with drivers. And frankly, drivers learned over time to say customers were rude or they slammed the door, which is a big complaint. They puked in my car, you know, so. You end up collecting a lot of data because of the frequency of transactions, and you often can act on that to hopefully make both sides better.
