Grab Becomes the Largest Tableau Online Customer in Asia Pacific with More Than 1,000 Interactors

Tableau, the global leader in visual analytics, today announced that Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading ride-hailing platform, is now the largest Tableau Online customer in Asia Pacific for self-service data analytics.

More than a thousand Grab employees across 40 cities in seven countries — recently expanding into Myanmar with its entry into Yangon — now have access to Tableau Online to visualise and analyse the data stream related to transport and cashless payments stored on its cloud platform. Within seconds, business leaders and employees in the field receive real-time visual analytics on the organisation’s business performance on their mobile devices and web browsers. Grab employees can securely subscribe to the relevant dashboards and data sources to share, interact and collaborate securely with their data.

Tableau Online plays an integral role in helping Grab employees keep a finger on the pulse of the business. Grab uses Tableau Online across departments to help them make data-driven decisions for all of its key offerings including its commercial carpooling service GrabShare, its free in-app messaging service GrabChat and the corporate transportation solution, Grab for Work.

GrabShare on Tableau for instance captures five real-time dashboards with insights on rides, passengers and drivers. With the use of Tableau Online to analyse and visualise these real-time data sources, Grab is able to make prompt strategic business decisions to optimise and refine its algorithms and promotions to attract more passengers to its GrabShare service. The use of Tableau Online enabled 2 million GrabShare rides and 20 million kilometres to be completed within two months of the launch in Singapore alone. Passenger match rate improved by 15%, with a 10% increase in average driver incomes.

“Providing our people with access to real-time data and analytics make sense for Grab, as we want to generate maximum value from maintaining one of the largest datasets in Southeast Asia to deliver the best ride-hailing platform for everyone,” said Cheryl Goh, Group Vice President of Marketing for Grab. “We constantly optimise and refine our marketing campaigns for all our services tailored to each city and have consequentially expanded our reach to serve more passengers and drivers,” Goh added.

JY Pook, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, Tableau said: “Both Grab and Tableau share a similar vision and company culture that embrace being data first. Visual analytics is key for businesses to harness the power of data and make smarter, more strategic decisions. Customer behaviours are evolving rapidly in the current digitised universe and so are the demands that technologically-savvy companies such as Grab have to attune to. We believe in enabling businesses and their employees with self-service platforms that will make it possible for anyone to better harness their insights from their own data faster and more easily than ever before.”

Grab was looking for a high-performing platform that could allow its employees to analyse, visualise, and derive actionable and impactful insights from their cloud data. Recognising the benefits of a full-hosted analytics solution like Tableau Online, Grab quickly adopted and deployed it across the company. It is now used by data analysts and marketing teams across Grab. Employees in product, research and development, as well as communications teams also use Tableau.

Grab first introduced the platform to its employees with the support of customised workshops, training, technical support, and maintenance in February 2015. Grab also organises its own regular hackathons known as Grabathons, where employees use Tableau to develop new products and solutions, such as enabling Android Pay for its GrabPay payments platform in Singapore. This has sharpened the data-driven, disruptive, and innovative culture of the company.