Hackday: The Referrals Scheme

Monthly Hack Days are back in the tech team’s calendar and although we have a list of weird and wonderful hacking ideas we wanted to get Sarah, our CMO, involved in the discussion for this month’s hack day.

Sarah joined us for a meeting to discuss her wish list and one item fit perfectly into the project criteria:

• Has to be deliverable within a day
• Needs work where designers, web developers and mobile app developers can get involved
• Solves a problem and/or makes us learn something new that will ultimately benefit the company

Sarah was concerned that the Referrals scheme which we have had in place for quite some time doesn’t have the visibility that it deserves — especially as our members can really benefit from the rewards.

We collated some examples and ideas of ways that we could achieve greater visibility for referrals and hopefully increase the number of members benefiting from the scheme and then spec’d out some clear deliverables:

• Rename the scheme to something a bit more catchy as it was called Share & Earn. Bruno suggested calling the scheme ‘Referrals’ — simple, effective and a true stroke of genius from our designer!

• Update the way codes are generated. Instead of random alphanumeric codes we would change this to take the members first name and then append some random numbers:

• Visibility on web — we would add a button along with a gift icon (which has become the brand for the referrals scheme) into the footer of the website to go through to the referrals section. If you are not logged in then you would be taken to a landing page with more information

• Visibility in apps — a similar floating button with gift icon would be added to the map view on the Android app:

• Design and develop a referrals landing page:

This month’s event was held in our own office for want of a more secluded area, so wetried to ensure minimal interruptions by sealing off the entrance to our office with some police line, which worked for the most part.

Towards the end of the day we were able to not only finish all the deliverables we also shipped these updates so you can see them on our platform right now.

I’ve always liked the thought that a Hiyacar owner is effectively a small business owner and we strive to provide the tools that enables our owners and our drivers to treat the platform as such.

With the account management section on the platform through to self marketing tools such as referrals and mates rates, a member is able to create customers and make some good money from one of their most valuable assets.