In
the article, Ms. Dowd notes that while some of these reviews are based on
interactions with the customer – such as people who keep the driver waiting or
are rude during the ride – some of them are as simple and petty as people who
are not fun, friendly or appealing to drive around, and even worse, there does
not appear to be any control in place over these potentially damaging ratings.
The author goes on to note that some users recommend paying additional cash
tips (ones which will not be reported to the company or the IRS unless the
driver wants them to be) and promising to give the driver a 5-out-of-5 rating
in return for receiving one as a customer. However, there’s no way to tell how
prevalent such methods are, or what effect (if any) they actually have on your
desirability as a customer…
Now,
we should probably acknowledge that any public-contact job is going to be made
more difficult by the tiny percentage of customers who will inevitably end up
being horrible people. In the case of Uber drivers, we’ve already had stories
about drivers refusing to pick up people with service animals, people who did
not appear to be sufficiently clean, or people who smelled bad, and having
people throw up during the ride has become so common that the company has had
to institute a standard fee for cleaning it up. There haven’t been any
confirmed cases of customers using an Uber ride as a washroom or a brothel yet,
but it’s not clear whether those things haven’t happened or if those cases just
haven’t reached the media. Even the company itself would have no way of knowing
about any such incident unless the driver elected to report it…
Given
these working conditions, and the fact that Uber drivers have to be able to see
a user’s profile before they can offer to pick up that user in the first place,
I think we can assume that an ad hoc system of rating customers – and passing
notes about which ones to avoid – would probably have come into being by now
even if the company hadn’t chosen to provide one. In theory, such a system
should help to enforce basic rules of behavior and courtesy for Uber
passengers, just as the rating system for drivers should enforce rules about
service, safety and upkeep on the vehicles; bad customers will not get offered
a ride, and bad drivers will not get taken up on any offers to provide one.
What isn’t clear is how often this system will lead to additional abuse – and what
the company can be expected to do about the situation…
Imagine
someone whose Uber passenger rating gets to be so bad that no one will stop to
pick them up, forcing them to use a (generally much more expensive)
conventional taxi. Now suppose that a driver does stop to pick them up, but
will only agree to provide transportation if given a large cash-only tip –
effectively raising the price of the ride. How long would it take before all of
the drivers started demanding such tips in return for a 5-out-of-five rider
review? Can the riders fight back by threatening to leave a poor driver review
in retaliation? Or, more to the point, perhaps, how long is it going to be
before all of the ratings are either quid pro quo arrangements or retaliation
against the other party, all of which are completely useless to anyone (driver
or passenger) trying to use the system?
This
issue has always been a problem for sites that offer customer reviews of
anything, from Amazon to online service providers, but unless the company has
some revolutionary new approach that we haven’t seen yet, the problem has just
taken on all new dimensions…
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