Designing Communication Strategy For A Superapp

About Gojek The Superapp

Gojek is a leading Southeast Asian technology company known for its super app offering a wide range of services, including ride-hailing, food delivery, digital payments, and more. Founded in 2010 in Jakarta, Indonesia, Gojek evolved from a motorcycle ride service to a comprehensive digital platform after launching its app in 2015. Gojek plays a crucial role in Indonesia by providing accessible and diversified services, significantly influencing daily life and the economy. It supports small businesses, enhances transportation accessibility, and promotes financial inclusion.

Communication Problem(s) of Superapp

A digital product communicates all the time with the user. The most common and traditional channels being in-app banners, push notifications etc. But when was the last time we (as users) truly experienced that every communication was not only complimentary to the experience but also highly relevant? And when you have 20+ services on one single super app, this problem multiples itself in every aspect - Product, Business and Marketing. To solve this we used a holistic communication UX strategy that empwers teams, satisfies business needs and delights customers. But before we go to the solution lets try and understand problem in detail -

• No common product strategy - On an average we send 12+ push notification on a daily basis to the average customer. Research and Social media sentiment states indicates that “Gojek spams users” is evident

• Low awareness - Our trending CTR for PNs is 0.6% - which means most customers never get educated about any new offerings, services or products.

• Low safety engagement - Users usually miss a lot of critical messages about their account safety - evident by lack of engagement with security PNs (trending much lower than average)

• Not tied to any business outcome - Lack of coherence between marketing, branding and product team across the ecosystem. Resulting in skewed metrics and lack of awareness of new updates on important features. No visible, centralised and monitored system to understanding who sends what communications to which segments of users and how? HMW we connect communication to Biz outcomes?

• Bad perception on social media hurts the brand and the business

My Role

As the design lead in communication stream, I pitched the initiative to leadership to go beyond traditional solution of push notification control and focus on a more holistic solution that empowers teams, satisfies business needs and delights customers. I was also resposible for first draft of design, one pager pitch and success metrics. Eventually, I led my design team ( 2 Designers & 1 Writer) to create all the solutions and helped in development of it over the course of two quarters.

Evangelising System Thinking

At its core this is a system thinking challenge. And to bring up all of its variables (Org, CX, UX, Perception, etc) and tackling this space will need a buy in and visibility from both org perspective and and customer’s perspective. Like a good movie cant start without a Storyboard, we cant start any feature/conversation without user journey. But this was a problem that can not be looked in a linear traditional journey, so we made a story (based on real data and research insights)

To help stakeholders understanding our mapping of communications for 30 days we gave them a storyboard of most important milestones by dissecting them from what we think users get vs what they actually get. When there is ambiguity, solve for it. When there is chaos, create transparency.

Top Learnings From The 30 Days Journey

1. User like to get engaged - not only to get asked to make an order  but also to spend time on the app e.g onboarding to raise awareness and education

2. Manage number of communication received within period of time - do not spam

3. Understand user buying pattern and use time-based approach to make it more relevant to user. Offer them at the right time, help user to aware of their needs thus they show interest in it. 

4. Manage number of product offered, prioritized with the product that user has interest in or at least well-aware to begin with

5. User are less expecting surprise at this point - they want all to be clear on how it works and its process

6. Extensive usage of PNs and little to none usage of other communication channels

7. No single space where all communications send out to users are stored, monitored and measured

Acknowledging Behavioural change

• Jacob Law’s gives us an insight into people’s mental model. How they consume information have changed drastically over the last decade - with the rise of TikTok, Instagram, Twitter etc

• External studies have established that people rarely read, and now more so than ever this holds true

• With the emergence of new social media platforms our way of consumption, changed drastically

Problem Statements

• HMW we do a better job in communicating with the customers?

• HMW treat them as humans by respecting the time rather than just numbers we *have* to send the communications to?

• How much are we embedded in marketing to map the experience of the customer?

• Relevance is key. However it still doesn't solve for the “white noise”. Brand tonality is critical as well but fails where irrelevancy creeps in. 

• HMW separate comms which are truly important to the users vs just normal marketing comms

Solution

We segregated communications from the POV of the customers. We did  a simple card sorting exercise with the customers to understand how they perceive certain communications. Typically, it was divided into three categories. - Promos, Non-Promos and Transactions.

We as a team were curious with non-promos, because it usually contained comms which were by default relevant to the the users - Security, bill payment reminders etc.

Principles & Governance On Existing Channels

One of the first things we evangised through product to the org was Hierarchy of Push Notifications

• P0: Order and Transaction updates

• P1 : Extremely contextual promotions - Targeted marketing campaigns

• P2: Product awareness, announcements etc

• P3: Non-contextual promotional notifications - Blanket marketing campaigns

This helped us to govern Push Notifications (PNs) by limiting promotional notifications to 2-3 per day. Making group promotions that are not personalized into a single notification. And lastly personalize promotional notifications to user demographic or historical context. While that did solve our initial problem it still didnt enough empowerment to truly help the users.

Monthly Email To The Org

A monthly email to the org to create awareness and sharing how much notifications were richly targeted to the users and how many were loosely targeted. Also giving a quantiative value to how much users are consuming information - Click Through Rate (CTR). By providing these stats we. not only achieved higher awareness within org, but also incentivised campaigns that were richly targeted with higher engagement.

How Might We Evolve Our Communication

By adopting new communication channels focused on user behavior, we aim to reduce spam, which is expected to improve user experience, lead to more engaging interactions, and foster a cleaner, more effective communication environment. Also depreciating old communication channels over time.

• Enable more content formats for engaging storytelling

• Allow for feedback collection to ensure relevance, and

• Have governance baked in to combat clutter and spam.

Our investigation led to three new communication channels which in theory sounded counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom, but helped our users, stakeholders and org immensely. We also depreciated two old communication channels over time.

[1] Gojek Official Bot

Using conversational design principles to give a delightful experience to the users. We  created a framework based on the categorisations which eventually led us to create the official Bot of Gojek. The reason we chose a bot channel was to mend the relationship between users and the Gojek. And we set principles around the bot to protect it from over communication and any dark patterns. We embodied our Gojek’s tone of voice and ran through many personality test to come up with a personality that has Gojek values and seems more human. Lastly, never sells anything to the user.

Most of the bots, were boring, dull and mechanical - While “smartness” can be relative actual experience needs to be at the foundational values of the bot.

Jeklin’s Priliminary Results

We ran multiple experiments and activation messages via Jeklin (treatment) and also sending same messages in “Inbox (legacy comms channel) + PNs” (control group). In the short while Jeklin has been live every single comms has seen at least 2x growth in CTRs and in some cases 5x growth in Conversions.

[2] Biz Sub Channels

Our Business Subscription channels’s is a great example of what looks good in paper isnt necessarily great for users.

For Users

1. Better control on communication: Sending product related notifications in targeted channels will help customers to choose what type of message they want to receive by subscribing to a desired channel. They would be able to opt-out of any channel if they don’t want to receive any such messages anymore. 

2. Better discovery of communication: Product specific channels will help customers to have better access to related promos and offers related to desired products at one place.

For Biz

1. Product specific channels: It will help to organize and filter communications to intended and more defined/dedicated communication channels for products rather than dumping all messages at one place where often messages are missed.

2. Quick feedback collection: Business channels can help collect instant feedback from the customers. They would be able to reply using text input or pre-defined actions and react to messages. This would allow Gojek to target specific customers and improve the quality of their business messages.

3. Target interested customers with offers, promos: With governance policy in place, It would be difficult to reach out to customers through PN and quantity is also limited. Chat, on the other hand, can provide better capability to products to still reach out to customers in non-intrusive ways (via mute notification feature)

4. Building stronger human relationships with customers (longer term): The past communications has seen various characters being used by different products to communicate with the end customers. Business channels can help build connections with the brands and customers in the longer term.

5. Better feedback mechanism: It will also allow users to react and respond to the communication and express their approval or disapproval towards certain kinds of communication rather than relying on different mediums such as social media and customer service to raise issues

While the launch was not a failure, the engagement rate was not really high. And the perception of “spam” amplified, instead of reducing.

We eventually rolled the feature back and focussed on Snippets which eventually solved for most of our problem space.

[3] Snippets

Snippets Impact

We stopped capturing a general CTRs and went campaign and channel specific. Which led to at least 2x in our CTRs and as high as 20x in some channels, and now we have a much better understanding of our user’s behaviour. With a very solid Push notification governance policy and principles for different channels which stakeholders are adhering by.

Conclusion

This project is close to my heart because even in 2024, the impact keeps on growing - channels like Jeklin helped in reducing bill penalties for users through personlised critical reminders/security notifications and Snippets paved way to rich media in Gojek with high engagement rate - directly helping in discovery of both new and existing services/features.

I also shared this story in fintech design summit