Enhancing Captain Communication with InAppStory

Careem, operating in over 70 cities across 10 countries, has built a significant network of ride-hailing drivers and delivery riders, known as "captains." These captains play a vital role in their operations and come from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Beyond transportation, Careem's "Everything" app offers services like food delivery and grocery shopping, increasing interaction with both captains and customers in the diverse communities they serve.

To ensure that Careem captains are well-informed and find their platform accessible, they emphasize direct, timely, and personalized communication. Their team update captains on app enhancements, bonuses, safety guidelines, rating improvement tips, delivery instructions, and weather conditions. Effective communication is key to delivering superior customer service.

What Was the Challenge?

Careem’s internal teams needed a better way to reach their captains (drivers and delivery partners) inside the mobile app. Existing communication methods weren’t effective enough.

Here’s what stood in the way:

• Low attention to standard channels: SMS and in-app messages were often overlooked, especially while captains were on the road.
• Lack of retention: Once a message was missed, it couldn’t easily be revisited.
• Language diversity: Careem’s captains speak multiple languages including Arabic, Urdu, English, French, and Kurdish. Static, one-language messages didn’t reach everyone effectively.
• Engagement drop-off: Traditional formats didn’t encourage captains to interact with or absorb important updates on topics like safety, rating policies, incentives, and city-specific announcements.

Careem needed a more engaging, flexible, and multilingual solution — one that captains could access on their own time, and that wouldn’t require constant technical support to manage.

How Did Careem Use In-App Stories?

To enhance engagement, Careem adopted social-style in-app Stories via InAppStory’s SDK. This allowed the communication team to publish visual content directly within the app, without engineering support. The Stories featured:

• Videos, GIFs, and images
• Interactive polls and quizzes
• Multilingual support (Arabic, Urdu, English, French, Kurdish)
• Stories on topics like safety, incentives, and city events

Content remained accessible on the app’s homepage, enabling captains to revisit essential updates even after missing them live.

Implementation

A discussion between Dharanidharan Gopalakrishnan and Vlad Lastovsky on LinkedIn evolved into a strategic partnership with InAppStory, enriching their communication with captains through an engaging format and a comprehensive archive of past notices.

“Careem InAppStory is an invaluable information channel. It lets me revisit content if I couldn’t fully engage with it initially, especially when messages arrived while I was driving. The stories on safety, city events, and rating improvements are incredibly useful.” - Khizer Hayat, a captain with over 5 years at Careem.

What Made InAppStory the Right Fit?

What set InAppStory apart for Careem was how the platform matched the real-world operational needs of a distributed, mobile-first workforce.

Here’s what made it work:

• Ease of content creation for non-tech teams
  Careem’s communication team was able to produce stories independently. With a no-code interface, they didn’t have to wait for development cycles to publish content across regions.
• Speed of deployment
  Stories could go live in minutes, not days. This mattered most when updates needed to reach captains quickly—especially those involving safety, incentive changes, or location-specific alerts.
• Scalability across cities and languages
  The platform allowed Careem to support multiple languages and adapt content regionally. This was critical in a business operating across diverse geographies with no one-size-fits-all messaging approach.
• On-screen persistence
  Stories remained visible after their initial publish time. Unlike one-time notifications, they lived on the app homepage, which helped reduce missed communication and made them useful as reference content.

Rather than layering on another disconnected communication tool, InAppStory gave Careem a direct, integrated way to manage and scale communication within the product captains already relied on daily.

Business Outcomes

The adoption of InAppStory resulted in significant improvements for Careem:

• Engagement with communication content doubled — a confirmed 2× increase in interaction rates.
• Captains became more aware of and responsive to updates on safety, ratings, incentives, and procedures.

The strategic decision to integrate InAppStory for disseminating information through stories proved to be a game-changer. It streamlined communication with the vast Captain community, bringing about a positive shift in crucial performance metrics and steering the company closer to its operational goals.

What You Can Learn from Careem

1. Use stories for essential updates when text messages aren’t enough
2. Support multiple languages to cater to a diverse audience
3. Add interactive elements like polls to boost captain participation
4. Make critical info evergreen — archive it so users can revisit anytime
5. Use analytics to fine-tune your messaging for performance