Didi ToB business full case review

When Yidao first started offering private cars around 2010, its enterprise services were launched simultaneously with its launch; Shenzhou originally started out in the car rental business and already had enterprise-level services, and after it launched private cars it also launched enterprise services; and traditional car rental companies eHi and Uber in the United States also launched enterprise services simultaneously with their launches.

Didi Taxi was originally a taxi service. In August 2014, it launched private cars, and in 2015, it launched enterprise-level services. However, compared with its competitors at the time, Didi's corporate travel service started relatively late.

Most people who use cars are office workers. When corporate employees need to work overtime, they initially use taxis. Didi hopes to optimize the entire taxi operation, so the first thing it thinks of is doing B-side business.

Enterprise-level services are common in car services. In the era of traditional car rental, corporate car use was the mainstream and a business with very high gross profit margins; so after traditional car rental companies switched to online car-hailing, they would naturally retain this business.

01 What pain points are solved by providing enterprise-level vehicles?

The operation, maintenance and management efficiency of corporate-owned vehicles, including government buses, is very low: Didi manages and dispatches drivers through mobile terminals, and its platform technology is more advanced.

Employees of companies in first-tier cities use cars for overtime and business trips, which involves congestion during rush hours in the morning and evening, and a lot of advance payment for transportation. In particular, there is the problem of invoices, which are numerous and complicated to reimburse. This was a very prominent problem that our entire team discovered after doing a lot of research and analysis. The service cost of transportation expense reimbursement within the enterprise itself is very high. The financial requirements for transportation taxi invoices of each company are different, which makes management difficult.

Therefore, we hope that by building such a platform, we can make the entire market transparent and balance supply and demand , and when using third-party public services, the entire reimbursement and payment process will be more convenient. The company's vehicles can be operated in a market-oriented and platform-based manner to reduce the company's management costs for official vehicles and improve employees' experience .

02 Organization and business positioning

Didi’s 2B service provides travel services and management solutions, which initially focused on two parallel directions: enterprises and governments.

When Didi started to provide enterprise-level car services, it already had internal resources including taxis, private cars, express cars, buses, chauffeurs, and ride-sharing services that could be used by both businesses and governments. When Didi was planning its corporate plan, it was prepared to provide a unified platform for corporate travel services, which could integrate Didi's external resources, including a company's own cars and so on.

There is a relatively complete plan , and until now it has not deviated too much from the original plan.

We have divided our corporate services into three modules: corporate vehicles , government vehicles , and vehicles used in cooperation with third-party channels .

1. Corporate vehicles: Administrative vehicles serve corporate employees for official travel, such as overtime, picking up and dropping off clients, business trips, etc.; Marketing vehicles serve the company's customers as part of a marketing tool.
2. Government vehicles: serving official travel for government and public institutions. Because government-related data actually involves the travel of civil servants, especially some special vehicles, the entire operation cannot be transparent and must be operated in a private cloud space.
3. Channel cooperation: As a third-party car service provider, such as airlines, OTAs, and hotel groups.

03 Corporate Cars

Corporate cars are divided into administrative cars and marketing cars:

1. Administrative vehicles

(1) Administrative vehicles - Causes

The number of C-end users gradually increased, but the competition was still fierce at that time. When the project was first proposed, it was actually mainly aimed at the marketing subsidy war with "Kuaidi". We hoped to find other ways to help win this battle, or other business lines could contribute.

Therefore, the use of corporate vehicles mainly involves three directions:

1. Each car user is managed by a company. Business travel expenses can be reimbursed (such as overtime and business trips). The decision-making power lies with the company.
2. Taxi is the main means of transportation for business trips within the city. Taxi invoices can be reimbursed. Taxi invoice reimbursement is a heavy workload for employees and companies and difficult to manage.
3. Business travel is not price sensitive and does not require C-end subsidies. Through the company, personal car usage habits can be locked in, and the C-end also uses Didi for their own travel

To sum up: both enterprises and individuals have car needs, and enterprises can decide some personal behaviors (for example, using an OA system in the company, all the company's related business is on it, and it is necessary to collaborate with other colleagues and other departments. Regardless of whether the experience is good or not, you must use the company's designated one), which is conducive to retaining C-end users and reducing marketing costs.

(2) Administrative Vehicles - Positioning

The logic of the entire business is actually quite simple, which is to package the ready-made buses on the C-end and provide them to the B-end. This way, there are two sources of income: channel commission for C-end car services and service fees for B-end car services.

(3) Administrative vehicles - scenarios

• Employee side: overtime, business trips, airport pick-ups, meetings, business trips, etc.
• Enterprise side: As a procurement project, it involves issues such as reporting, financial reimbursement, and invoice management.

In providing such services, we actually encountered many problems, and the first one we encountered was actually compliance issues. Because the regulations for online ride-hailing had not been issued at that time, the biggest problem we faced was whether companies could accept the unified invoices issued - not taxi invoices. We need to break down the enterprise first. We initially dealt with the finance department. Can this be recognized as a reimbursement voucher? ——Now the entire Internet industry should be familiar with the invoices issued by Didi, but it was still quite difficult when it was first promoted.

When we were expanding our customer base, foreign companies were not able to enter at first, basically because they could not use the services due to compliance issues. In fact, in enterprise-level car services, the environment at that time was the biggest barrier .

It will also involve many product and service issues, such as anti-cheating issues, fixed-price issues in third-party cooperation, and many other details.

(4) Administrative vehicles - core products

The core of the entire administrative vehicle business consists of two lines: corporate payment and personal payment .

Through corporate payments and personal advance payments, basically all corporate travel reimbursement needs are met. Through this system, companies generally manage their business through rules; if that doesn’t work, they can resort to personal advance payment and online reimbursement, which is also very simple - when paying, choose personal payment, and if you need reimbursement, add a label, and it will be categorized separately in the system. When you submit for reimbursement at the end of the month, it will appear directly in the reimbursement module - submit - review - reimburse in one go.

If we look at the entire business process in detail, it is actually a very complicated process. As long as finance is involved, the management and reconciliation of the entire capital chain will be very troublesome, and the company has the final say on compliance or not. There are a lot of interactions with businesses, and some parts even have to interact with the employees who use the cars, so there are a lot of troubles.

How to bypass these? In fact, if we do a little more, for example, connect with other people’s financial systems or third-party financial software .

There will be a lot of B-side processes and the time cycle will be relatively long, but after all, it is a management, and employees rarely complain about the bad platform experience, after all, the rules are formulated by the platform and the enterprise. Therefore, once the logic of corporate car use and especially corporate payment is used, user retention is quite high .

(5) Administrative vehicles - thinking

• 2B products can only be sold if they meet 80% of the customer's needs;
• For 2B products, if one function is not met, it may block a large number of customers. API, cost center;
• 2B products must match the company's management model and reflect the corporate culture.
• For 2B products, it is impossible to satisfy all roles, so we need to find a balance point that is acceptable to all parties. Corporate payments.

2. Marketing vehicles

(1) Marketing vehicles - Causes

Outside of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, companies do not work overtime very often, so the amount of vehicles used for overtime work is not high;

Many companies use the enterprise version of the ride-hailing service for marketing activities, especially in second- and third-tier cities where the agents are located;

Especially in second- and third-tier cities, it is the agents who help us expand our corporate clientele, and we share the profits with them. However, due to the principle of anti-cheating, for example, if one person calls a lot of taxis at the same time, he may not pay after calling them, resulting in bad debts, so we will prevent it.

In this situation, companies have received many complaints - why can't one person call multiple cars? When we help customers call a car, several people have to place the order one by one?

Later, we launched marketing vehicles. Logically speaking, it actually connects our B-side car service with our customers' business . The simplest one is, for example, a customer serves his customers (calling a taxi on their behalf, etc.); in addition, there are some customers who use cars for operational activities and marketing activities, etc.

Although we still make the same amount of money under this model, the logic is different and the customers we serve are also different. Use our products to help users add value to their products and services.

(2) Marketing vehicles - core products

A typical product here is the corporate invitation voucher .

Because we originally divided the invitation coupons into seven directions, and through ride-hailing, we can control the departure place, destination, and designated mobile phone number to conduct marketing activities, etc. However, there will still be cases such as malicious order placement, user corporate payments for personal matters, or malicious excessive fee settlements, etc.

Later, through product optimization, we launched the ABA model, which is A calls a car - B takes the car - A pays, and it can be sent out in the form of coupons or red envelopes, which can be used for marketing for enterprises. For example, if a restaurant opens a store, customers can take a taxi to the restaurant or go home after eating. The company will send out invitation coupons, and the entire car usage fee will be paid by the company.

We originally cooperated with real estate agencies to provide special cars for house viewing . In the entire marketing scene, there were also special cars for food , special cars for recruitment , etc. If you want to invite a customer to come, you don’t need to tell him where you are. Just send him an invitation ticket and lock the address. Then you only need to press a button to call a car driver, who will know where to pick up the customer and then take him to the destination.

At that time, we thought of many scenarios, promoted to users, helped some companies use car usage for marketing, attracted new users, and then learned about user-related behaviors and distribution areas. In fact, the effect was very good.

(3) Marketing Vehicles - Thinking

• Companies are willing to use products that help them save money, and they rush to use products that help them make money.
• Anti-cheating is a very important function for marketing products;
• The business logic of marketing car products is 1+1>2. The sum of your product and his product is worse than the service he originally used alone. For example, instead of asking users to take a taxi, it is better to directly issue a coupon, or help push it to the customer. When the customer sees your ad, he can scan the code and go over, which provides better user experience and better conversion rates in all aspects.

04 Government vehicles

1. Government vehicles-Cause

From 2015 to 2016, there was a period of intense rumors about the bus reform. At that time, it was claimed that the bus reform would be completed by the end of 2016, and each locality had to come up with policies on how to do it.

In 2016, a city government wanted to carry out public bus reform and allow Didi to provide services. Then we built a government car platform (actually, we packaged Didi’s capabilities and provided them to the city government), which should still be in use now - this was also the earliest time Didi started its car rental business, because the government has both companies with and without drivers.

2. Government vehicles - positioning

The positioning of government vehicles is very simple. Their internal vehicle management is just a small Didi, and they set their own prices internally. In addition, they also made a suggestion that if there are not enough vehicles, they hope that Didi's platform can connect the resources. For example, when hosting large conferences or events, Didi’s vehicles can serve government users; in addition, when government vehicles are idle, they can pick up external customers.

It is still relatively difficult to promote public bus reform, and the above is a particularly good logic. Because what everyone valued at the time was Didi's transportation capacity. The government and large state-owned enterprises all have their own independent car service companies. They hope to cooperate with us in personnel dispatch and maintenance of various vehicles to revitalize the vehicles below.

But because there was no compliance at that time and there were various concerns, the bus reform should have only been a cooperation of that one municipal government. But this is actually a particularly good solution for bus reform.

3. Government vehicles - core products

Government car services are different from corporate car services. Corporate car services are provided through the C-end and resources are provided by public platforms; however, there are many resource platforms and car types for government cars, as well as many types of special vehicles and personnel classifications . Some are even special vehicles for leaders that require one-to-one binding, as well as one-to-many binding. Then the entire vehicle management and driver management become more complicated.

So we made a government APP specifically for the government to use for dispatching purposes. Only the map service and strategy-related anti-cheating services used the services of the public platform, and all other parts were developed independently. We define it as a small Didi, and it is a small Didi that can connect with the big Didi. It was originally envisioned that if Didi could revitalize the company's internal buses, it would be able to increase its transportation capacity and have better relations with local governments.

4. Government vehicles - thinking

• Making each government's bus management system into a small Didi that can communicate with Didi is a very good solution for bus reform : empowering the system that needs to manage its own cars, conducting internal vehicle dispatch, and then forming tracks. All prices can be managed like Didi, efficiency can be improved, and it can be connected with the big Didi, so that there can be coordination of peaks and troughs.
• It was not a good time to be a government car dealer. There were issues with vehicle compliance, Didi’s ability to output, and Didi’s development direction.
• Advanced solutions in every industry are good solutions to similar problems : the logic is the same as Didi's service for C-end users. We simply package Didi's entire system into a cloud solution and then provide it to relevant governments and public institutions.
• The government is a special customer with high independence requirements. Sometimes, capability output is more important than direct service provision . When building a SaaS platform, you will definitely encounter conflicts between private cloud and public cloud, or between value services and independent deployment, because it involves issues of data security, information security and control.

05 Channel Cooperation

The channel cooperation originally only had an external API, so when we were connecting with airlines and hotels, we used our API. But in essence, it is just a channel for the C-end. Including some airlines, they have gradually taken over Didi's channel. Now Didi's cars should be able to be called on many ends. In fact, this is all in the direction of channel cooperation.

Conclusion

Product comparison and overall thinking:

• The importance of product positioning: For each product, who it serves, the business model, how to make money, etc. must be determined at the beginning. As you can see, Didi has basically not changed its direction since it was first determined.
• 2B business should think long-term and not focus on short-term profit and loss: Although everyone knows that To B business itself is to make money, in fact, in the early stage, To B business needs investment, and subsequent customers will come in and it will be very stable
• It is difficult for companies dominated by C-end business to incubate good B-end products unless they are given sufficient independence: this is something that I can particularly empathize with later, including the support of many R&D resources on the C-end, which are very difficult to cooperate with. Because of the different thinking logic and the fact that the business volume of the B-end cannot be compared with that of the C-end, internal communication itself will be very difficult. This also depends on the culture of each company;
• Didi has missed many good opportunities for cooperation: government cooperation, including many opportunities for platform cooperation
• The different genes of 2B business and 2C business: management and service, cooperation and self

Author: Mr. Ye

Source: Qidian College