Bolt, the European and African mobility firm has said that offline trips and alleged assault cases are its main points as the firm moves to secure its ride hailing and online ordering network.
“Offline trips and assaults are some of our major pain points. We are launching this campaign as we enter the festive season because there will be a user spike,” said Bolt Africa Safety Manager Hazel Omune while demonstrating the newly launched safety features in Kenya. “Some of the complaints include a rider or passenger pushing or banging the door, grabbing personal property for lack of payments, physical confrontation,verbal compliments or sexists comments or similar demands.”
Some driver-partners may opt to use offline trips to avoid using the app’s pricing tool to save on driver-partner commissions which some see us an unfair to them.
Bolt commits Sh14 billion over three years to support safety awareness
Omune was speaking at press event earlier today where Bolt committed Sh14 billion over three years to support safety awareness and launched a set of new Bolt safety features and preventative measures to help prevent safety cases before they happen.
Bolt announced that it’s Safety Team of over 500 people brings together Safety Specialists and Experts to tackle some of the most complex challenges in ride-hailing. The team’s core, based in Bolt’s Tallinn HQ, includes Safety Experts specially trained in product development, engineering, and operations.
The team will focus their efforts on product development, support, and scaling preventative measures to stop safety cases before they happen in that time.
Over 500 Safety Specialists and Experts
“We’ll also continue to raise awareness of our safety tools with educational campaigns like the current ‘Bolt Safety Team’ campaign running in Kenya, to raise awareness of the in-app features that we know can help prevent cases.” said General Manager Kenya, Linda Ndungu.
The KES. 14 billion Safety Campaign will raise awareness of safety features and scale preventative measures to help prevent safety cases. Bolt also launched new verification features to its suite of safety tools in the coming months to help address the critical role of mutual trust between driver partners and riders in the safety of the platform, including trip count and unique four-digit trip pick-up codes to help match riders and driver partners. Bolt will also continue to scale its Rider Verification solution.
Trip count and unique four-digit trip pick-up codes
Training, driver guidance and new safety features are not the only measures Bolt has taken to make its platform safe. In June, the firm announced it had permanently blocked over 6,000 drivers from its platform due to non-compliance and safety-related matters. The move was part of it’s ongoing commitment to providing safety for its ride-hailing and online ordering sectors. The purge, which affected both drivers and riders reported for misconduct and non-compliance, took over six months.
Bolt also introduced stricter compliance measures during the the driver screening process, where drivers undergo a background check before being able to drive on the Bolt app. These will make sure that no one rents or hires out their Bolt cars or accounts to unregistered drivers. Some drivers also change their cars for older or different one’s when their registered cars are faulty or unavailable causing confusion to riders.
There have been bad incidences of misconduct from both drivers and passengers in South Africa and across the continent, intensifying its efforts to enforce platform guidelines is the right thing for Bolt to do.
Bolt Africa Safety Manager added that Bolt also provides general guidance for user safety to its driver-partners on expected behavior during and after rides. The firm says it has had a good year without any major incidents on its platform due to that.
“We provide general guidance on appropriate behavior to our driver-partners. We advise them not to be their best and avoid personal compliments or personal questions which might be seen as sexual or sexist to some of the riders,” said Omune. “We have a dedicated guidance on sexual harassment and safety precautions through educational and awareness. Bolt also provides guidance to driver-partners on fatigue, mental health and working hours.