What Mobility Services Mean for Today’s Businesses

December 13th, 2019 | by Mark Thomas, EVP of Marketing and Alliances | Posted in: Insight on Things

Future of Transportation

At the Future of Transport Conference this week, a presentation on the implications of mobility services really opened my mind. I’d been thinking so much about how mobility service providers should run their services that I’d forgotten to consider what mobility services mean for today’s businesses too.

Here are a few key examples:

  • Walmart: Rather than offering free shipping to customers, how about “shipping” the customer for free to the store? Walmart and Waymo today are exploring how this would work.
  • Cabonline: Retailers are improving the customer experience around returning products by using Cabonline’s surplus taxi capacity to facilitate picking up returns. It’s a win for the cab company keeping taxis busy at off-peak times and a win for retailers’ customers too.
  • Tesco: Tesco plans to offer their customers free trickle charging and paid enhanced vehicle charging while they shop. The low cost of electricity is likely to be considerably less than the increased customer loyalty and shopping preference for customers with e-vehicles.
  • Medical industry: One of high operational costs within the medical industry is missed appointments. Doctor groups have begun offering rides to patients who are at high risk of missing appointments with Lyft . The cost of the Lyft is outweighed by the benefit of ensuring patients (and their billable hours) are not lost.
  • CARGO: Cargo’s business is to enable ridesharing drivers to sell and sample goods to customers while they are getting rides. Large consumer goods companies are leveraging the Cargo network as a new channel to sample and sell goods to an attractive customer demographic – ridesharing customers!

Overall, other industries are able to grow their businesses by leveraging shared mobility networks. And shared mobility companies are able to increase their revenues by partnering with traditional businesses to help them enrich their customers’ experiences. It’s a fundamental truth with shared mobility that the way to create a high-yield shared mobility solution is to enable your fleet to enjoy multiple revenue streams. Some of the business models may be B2B models in addition to the classic B2C models that are more familiar to the operators of shared mobility.

Thanks Ashish Khanna of LEK for the inspiring talk. For those who would like more information about his model and further examples, refer to the insightful LEK paper on mobility as a springboard for innovation.

Author: Mark Thoms, VP of Marketing and Alliances, Ridecell