Staying relevant in the Radio cabs space - Is Meru holding up?

Nokia's CEO ended his speech while announcing their distress sale to Microsoft saying, “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” Immediately, he and the entire management team publicly wept.

All case studies on Nokia dissecting the reasons for failure point to one thing in common - "inadequate pace of innovation & the seeming reluctance to change even as their world was turning upside down". Interestingly, all market leaders across industries who have been swept away with fundamental changes in their respective industries have this in common - Polaroid, Yahoo or Sun Microsystems.

When I need to book a cab, I usually check the 3 apps on my phone - Uber, Ola and Meru. The occasion decides the app that gets picked. If its an early-morning drop to the airport, the choice invariably is Meru (having burnt hands on a couple of occasions while trying to switch to other operators). For every other case its either Uber (on those rare occasions where surge pricing is not on!) or Ola.

Having used Meru for over 8 years, I'm amazed at their consistency - both, in their 'uber' punctuality with guaranteed before-time arrival AND in they being wedded to technology that is atleast few years behind the industry. 

Their Android app has few frustrating touchpoints. For instance, a basic thing such as the 'favorites' feature doesn't really store your home/office location. Meru, surprisingly doesn't yet have a navigation map for its drivers. The GPS seems to be used only for cab booking. So, the driver doesn't have the advantage of routing technology, and the customer's bill summary doesn't provide a route map, unlike Ola/Uber, which offer this check on whether the driver took an optimal route. Without GPS mapping & proper address storage, you end up explaining your home address & landmark to the drivers, every single time. 

While these contribute to a poor UX overall, their significantly higher fares put off users. Today, a bulk of their daily trips seem to come from airport drops and pick-ups, which is one location where you can still find a very high number of their cabs. Considering that the rival cab aggregators do a pretty good job in the above areas along with providing a seamless app user experience, it remains to be seen when Meru would catch up. However, I've noticed in the past that they took an inordinate amount of time to start offering online payment and wallet facilities, years after their peers, so this may take a good amount of time, as well.

As a side note, strangely I've noticed several of their drivers, across trips handing over their business card containing personal contact details, with Meru branding, possibly encouraged by the company. This is puzzling to say the least on why a cab aggregator would encourage their drivers to push for direct bookings with customers.

Pic Source: Forbes article

Thus, directionally the story of Meru cabs doesn't appear to be too different from the fall of some of these biggest names, in the anecdote at the starting of this post. Meru had a stellar rise to the top in the organised cab players market and at a point had a near monopoly in a couple of major Indian cities. The arrival of cab aggregators marked the reinvention & rejuvenation of this industry - players like Uber, Ola & the erstwhile Taxi4sure had innovated the radio cabs space, unseated Meru cabs from its leadership position and gave it serious competition. 

Thankfully, the story is not yet over for Meru. It continues to try and reverse the downward trend, raise funds and even put in place an expansion plan to fight back. However, the initiatives don't seem to be paying off at the pace that the competition is grabbing business from them. Atleast from a consumer's perspective, things don't seem to look good.