Grab automates customer support using Workflows

NOTE: This summary was pulled from a talk that the Grab team presented at Replay 2023.

Grab delivers a “super app” that offers a wide range of services in Southeast Asia through a single mobile application. The key services include ride-hailing (GrabTaxi), food delivery (GrabFood), package delivery (GrabExpress), financial services (GrabPay), and more (GrabMart - grocery delivery, etc.). They are a major player in the Southeast Asian tech scene, and are known for these convenience and comprehensive service offerings.

Customer support is a crucial element for any business, but for a super app like Grab, with its vast array of services and presence across multiple countries and languages, managing customer inquiries can be a complex challenge. This challenge requires them to diversify their customer support function so that it can scale across all the services and to do so as efficiently as possible.

Traditionally, customer support requests have involved a mix of manual intervention and potentially unreliable automation solutions. This could lead to issues like:

• Limited Visibility: Difficulty tracking the progress of customer requests and identifying bottlenecks.
• Maintainability Challenges: Debugging problems within a complex system with multiple moving parts can be time-consuming.
• Fragile System: Outages in one part of the system could impact the entire customer support workflow.
• Manual Intervention: Manual intervention may be necessary during outages or for complex issues, increasing response times and resource usage.

Customer Support Temporal Workflows

Grab identified Temporal as a solution to streamline and automate their customer support workflows because it allows developers to define complex, long-running workflows consisting of multiple steps that can be triggered by various events, such as a customer submitting a support ticket. There are thousands of possible support flows that could be automated across the various product lines and enabling developers to define these as Workflows and Activities presented a direct link to the problem domain which shortcutted the definition and review of the many workflows that are necessary. Engineers could share code that read like the business problem.

Grab’s success story highlights the effectiveness of a workflow-oriented architecture for designing complex systems. By breaking down functionality into well-defined workflows, developers can create a more maintainable and scalable system.

Temporal is one of those Technologies that really fundamentally changed the way I think about building distributed systems.

Replay 2023 Video

This summary was pulled from a talk that the Grab team provided at Replay 2023. You can check out the video below or see all the videos from the show on our Replay 2023 video page.