Launched in 2015 in Dubai, Ekar has quickly made a name for themselves as the largest carshare provider in the Middle East.
The car rental platform provides access to over a thousand cars in Dubai and Abu Dhabi that are available on pay-per-minute, daily, and weekly terms. All users have to do is to download the app for Android or iOS and register with a valid driving license, ID, and a credit card.
The team has recently raised $17.5 million in a Series B round and is currently expanding to Saudi Arabia starting with the launch in the capital, Riyadh.
A little extra bonus for auto enthusiasts would be the fact that Ekar is also one of a few car sharing companies offering Tesla models. Oh, and they’ve already placed an order for an infamous Tesla Truck, so stay tuned!
In their early days, the team used to have an in-house back office solution. As the company expanded, though, it’s eventually become insufficient and tiring to spend developers’ time on its maintenance. After some time of searching for an alternative, they finally decide to opt for Jet Admin.
Microservice Architecture
Ekar uses multiple resources to manage their application data and business metrics. This mainly includes their databases and APIs. Since Jet Admin allows for several sources, they’ve been able to integrate all of them with the admin panel and visualize all data they have in one window.
The Easiest to Use Admin Interface
As a rapidly growing company, Ekar was looking for a scalable solution that would both speed up their operations and be simple enough for new and non-tech employees to hop on.
“I love the pagination and the fact that you can do certain things like going to customer details from their Invoice page. Our Accounts team are totally in love with this.”
In Jet Admin, Ekar team members are able to efficiently browse through invoice and user data. The configured field widgets make it easier to see the statutes of invoices, the reservation numbers, customer IDs, etc. The well-thought-out UX can save a lot of time to agents and is a true life-saver in emergency situations.
Thanks to the Filter feature, Ekar agents can effortlessly search through big datasets and find information in no time. For instance, it’s very convenient to search for a car by its plate number or look for a user’s record page by their email or reservation number.
User Moderation
During registration, users are uploading scans of their ID and driver’s licence on the app to confirm their identity and verify driver’s license information. Ekar’s account managers that are responsible for validating this data are using Jet Admin’s built-in Image Viewer and Field Widgets to review if all required documents are in place and convert users.
Monitoring Payments & Transactions
Financial data is something one can never be too cautious about, and, respectively, Ekar’s top priority was to protect payment and transaction data from anyone who’s not meant to have access to it. Luckily, Jet Admin’s extensibility and team-based permissions helped them with this goal.
Thanks to the microservice architecture we mentioned, the Ekar team has integrated their third-party payment service with Jet Admin to create a Transactions collection where only permitted users can view the transaction data and are able to immediately fix issues.
“We don’t want to give that access to anyone. This is something very specific to our executives.”
Ekar has also been able to implement a custom view for managing payments. Here operators can quickly charge drivers against a specific type of fee and make a refund or reimbursement without having to leave the admin panel.
Speaking of custom elements, Jet Admin’s Flex Action feature comes in handy every time agents need to download an invoice or quickly send an email to a user associated with the invoice.
Fleet Management
To see if a vehicle is available or not, one can simply check their status in the collection view. From a record view Ekar agents are able to see and edit all the commercials, logistics, and legal documents associated with a given vehicle as well as view their reservation history and check for alerts.
With the GPS latitude and longitude data the team can track their vehicles in a Map widget (an out-of-the-box feature) right in the admin panel. Other important metrics, such as mileage, battery voltage, and fuel level are displayed in the record view and can be easily monitored as well.
Issue Management
Ekar call agents are using Jet Admin to manage reported issues. It’s very easy to sort complaints into groups on a kanban board and edit their statuses right in a table view. What’s helpful, the team is able to keep all images and receipts connected with a given issue and user in a record. This saves a tremendous amount of time that would otherwise be spent looking for these pictures in the chat or databases.
Results
In conclusion, Jet Admin has taken away the stress of building and maintaining internal admin tools from the Ekar team and, instead, let them fully focus on the development of their application. Besides the improved operational efficiency, teams have been able to gather valuable metrics and make data-driven decisions.
