Uber Drives Stellar Customer Service On a Global Scale

Martin Rowlson, the Global Head of Process Excellence for Uber turned to process mining technology, which is helping his team drastically improve customer service operations, and standardize best practices for customers worldwide.

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Uber Drives Stellar Customer Service on a Global Scale with Celonis

In 2010, Uber fundamentally changed the transportation industry with their revolutionary technology, and delivered on their mission “To create opportunity through movement”. Uber’s unrelenting passion for delivering stellar customer service with simple and innovative solutions is what led them to grow into the enormous multinational transportation network company it is today, available in more than 700 cities across 63 countries on six continents.

When operations started to rapidly expand across the globe, and Uber’s customer base continued to expand exponentially, it became increasingly difficult to ensure each and every user receives consistently excellent customer service throughout every region.

To solve this issue, Martin Rowlson, the Global Head of Process Excellence for Uber turned to process mining technology, which is helping them drastically improve their customer service operations, and standardize best practices for customers worldwide.

Uber Standardizes World-Class Customer Service Across All Regions

“The way Uber formed was very autonomous by location which led to process variation across regions. Now as we scale up and become a bigger organization, we now need to standardize and get efficiencies out of our scale.”

As Uber continued to grow, they wanted to create standardized customer service processes that ensured customers in every region experienced the same standard of excellence they’ve come to expect. However, to do so they first needed a way to analyze millions of interactions and understand the variations at a global scale.

Using the Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud—the world’s leading cloud-based process mining platform—Rowlson and his team are now able to visualize how different customer service processes are performing across every region, and make adjustments based on this analysis to create a standardized system for delivering excellent customer experiences.

“Being able to compare visually, on one screen, how one process is behaving, and how it may be behaving in a different location, and being able to see that side by side… it's incredibly powerful,” said Rowlson.

Rowlson and his team continue to act on key insights provided by Celonis to ensure that each of their 20,000 employees across the globe use best practices that drive the highest standards of customer service possible. “You think that people are following a process one way, and then you realize through using process mining technology that in fact that's not the case. So having that visibility through Celonis is very powerful, and it gives us the ability to understand what everybody's doing, and ultimately start to move towards a standardized, more efficient model."

We look at where we create those moments that excite and please the customer, and then figure out how we can then replicate those across different processes, [and] different locations.

Uncovering Hidden Inefficiencies in Customer Service

One of the most notable examples include Uber’s recent success in eliminating long ticket resolution times—a move which continues to save the company massive amounts of time and capital.


The reason why these inefficiencies have remained undetected prior to Celonis involves the vast quantities of ticket data needed to be analyzed. Uber’s customer service agents handle an enormous amount of tickets. In just 2.5 months, the Uber team was able to deploy Celonis, which extracts these massive data volumes from Uber’s custom-designed customer service management system.

Today, Uber is using process mining from Celonis to compare ticket flows and throughput times across regions, cities and service centers. This allows Rowlson’s team to pinpoint “long-runners,” time-wasting activities, and other inefficiencies, and to identify and share best practices for each individual ticket type and for the customer service process overall.

“Historically, we've had to go and do manual data collection,” said Rowlson. “Now we don't have to. We've got a bigger sample size, so process mining enables us to speed up what we used to do.”

Celonis is a way that you can identify failure and resolve it and fix the process as soon as possible.

The Road to Superfluid Customer Service Processes


Providing the best service possible for their customers with simple, innovative solutions has always been a top strategic priority for Uber.

“Uber is able to progress at the speed that we do because of how we can innovate so fast,” said Rowlson. “Celonis is a way that you can identify failure and resolve it and fix the process as soon as possible.”

With process mining technology, Rowlson and his team are able to transform Uber’s customer service processes into fast and frictionless experiences for their customers. Improved customer service, decreased ticket resolution times, and a standard of process excellence executed across all regions is just the beginning of Uber’s process mining goals. In the future, Rowlson expects to use Celonis to identify and eliminate process inefficiencies before they even exist.

“At the moment, it's very much reactive where we're actually mining process to find inefficiencies,” said Rowlson, “I think in the future we'll be able to proactively identify these inefficiencies and remove that friction sooner.”

Uber has already received overwhelmingly positive responses from their customers who now enjoy the faster, smoother and more efficient experiences facilitated by Celonis Process Mining. And this response is reflected in their continuing financial success—in 2018, Uber made $49.8B in annual gross bookings (total payments from riders, eaters and carriers), and $14.6B in Q1 of 2019.

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