Uber
Errors are relatively common within the Uber app, typically when a rider request cannot be fulfilled or when the rider-driver connection has been made but cannot be carried through. Many of these errors are dependent one external factors such as driver supply, rush hour, or demonad surges which Uber can only do its best to predict and mitigate. Luckily, this also means that customers facing errors can extrapolate the root cause to an external reason. Errors are also very short-term.
The business cost of an error is the revenue of one potential ride (~10). However, if errors are recurrent, the business cost could be the lifetime value of a frustrated customer who moves to Lyft instead.
The recovery flow usually involves encouraging the customer to try again to connect to a ride, which protects Uber’s ride completion metric.
Slack
Slack errors include outages or routing issues, which can cause massive disruptions to organizations that rely on Slack as a main communication / file sharing hub. These errors, unlike Uber, are likely internal; additionally, their consequences have larger ramifications on the work of hundreds of thousands of users and workplaces.
Slack loses on immediate revenue for the hours of its outage; however, it’s also likely to lose customer loyalty and subscriptions to its products, perhaps from entire organizations. Not only does it harm itself, however, but also the productivity and revenue generation from companies that rely on it. The damage to reputation is also huge – if Slack is viewed as inconsistent and insecure, it will lose its biggest customers, which are businesses that hold its work tools to the highest standard.
Banking apps
Error handling is of the utmost importance for banking apps. Trust, once broken, is difficult to earn back, especially in a land where dozens of other banking services are just a button away. Thus error handling within banks should be extra transparent, informative, and restore customer trust.
