An alert framework for global live ops.
UberEats 2020
Terra is UberEats’ marketplace real-time monitoring tool used by global Live Ops to manage our global marketplace dynamics. When there is an imbalance in supply and demand (a sudden spike in demand, for example), ops teams can pull various levers that help balance the marketplace in real-time.
1 — The new feature
We designed and developed a new activity and alert framework within Terra that gave UberEats Live Ops team timely alerts and full context of global marketplace dynamics. This new feature led to:
25%
Agents productivity
15m
Alerts resolvement time
2 — The challenge
There was not a centralized place to view actions taken to manage the marketplace.
Ops needed multiple tools to understand what was happening in the marketplace:
Gchat bot
Ops built a bot that share real-time alerts in Gchat. However, this chat does not give agents full context of the marketplace dynamics.
Klaxon web app
Independent app that stores global marketplace real-time alerts, which does not provide any context about marketplace health.
Ops activity query
Terra logs all actions taken and state of the market at the time. However, this is only available in a database that must be queried externally and on an ad hoc basis.
3 — User research
Sam - Ops Manager
Ensure consistent supply and demand across Eats marketplace through continuous analytical assessment and intervention. Manage a team of COEs.
Tasks & Responsibilities
- • Use Terra once a week for reviewing and reportingpurposes
• Help COE agents when serious issues arise, or when COE agents request to review their work
- • Run queries once a week to review COE performance
Core needs
• Comprehensive picture of Marketplace health and COEs’ actions. Data is real-time so historical metrics are crucial in his evaluation of team performance
• Deeply care about COE agents responsiveness to alerts and the results of their actions
Peter - Center of Excellence agent
Monitor the Marketplace in real-time and resolve when problems arise. If the problem is serious, escalate to Ops managers.
Tasks & Responsibilities
- • Use Terra daily for marketplace monitoring
- • Depending on level of autonomy, fix problems when they arise
- • For serious issues, escalate to Ops Managers
Core needs
- • Monitor the latest alerts in real-time
• Avoid duplicated efforts by having insights into his team’s work progress
• The ability to communicate to his team when special circumstances happen that they decided to do something out of the norm
4 — Setting goals
User adoption: 7-day active users
Time to alerts resolvement
of markets per agent
of markets per agent
5 — The solutions
We streamlined the workflow by removing the dependency on Klaxon. This helped conslidate the number of steps because agents have full context of marketplace dynamics within Terra. Team communication is streamlined since agents have visibility over who works on which tasks.
Agents can filter alerts by locations, down to the country and region level.
Tapping on each row reveals full context of marketplace dynamics at that time. A graph helps ops understand how and why the alert was fired.
On Activity tab, Ops managers can monitor team performance at any time. There’s no need to run hours long query anymore. Terra highlights actions that go against AI’s recommendations to make it easier for managers to inspect special cases.
We added alerts to the historical chart to help ops managers understand the relationship between alerts and market conditions.