Chalo Increases App Click-Through Rate by 150% with the Reliability, Accuracy, and Functionality of HERE and AWS

Around five percent of India’s population has access to a car, leaving the vast majority to rely on public transportation—primarily, buses—for their daily mobility. An insufficient number of buses, paired with traffic congestion, means the wait for a bus is long and the arrival time of a bus isn’t predictable. That’s where transport technology startup Chalo, a Navi Mumbai-based bus tracking and payments provider, saw potential. Chalo’s application brings predictability to bus travel by allowing users to see where their bus is in real time, estimate when it will arrive, and pay fares digitally. 

As the company expanded to new cities in India and the Philippines, the pitfalls of its location technology partner was negatively affecting the user experience. When Chalo moved into less populated cities, it discovered notable gaps in location coverage and the accuracy of key geopoints. This resulted in useability problems with the location search feature, causing lower click-through rates and more user-reported issues. 

“Our customers would type a destination into the search bar and it wouldn’t show up,” said Vinayak Bhavnani, co-founder and CTO of Chalo. “Our primary motive was to find a provider that had good coverage and location accuracy, not just in the large metropolitan areas, but also in the tier-two and tier-three cities of India.” The previous partner’s timeline for fixing the issues was too slow for Chalo to maintain momentum and achieve its long-term goals. The team knew that if it were going to increase user engagement, create reliability, and add new services and locations, it would have to find better mapping and location technology. 

After a referral from AWS, Chalo chose AWS Partner HERE Technologies to provide location services and comprehensive mapping on the backend. “HERE had better geographical coverage and location accuracy compared to other providers, and the pricing was effective,” Bhavnani said. “Also, the HERE team is collaborative, which is essential to the long-term partnerships we seek.” Chalo decided to build a proof of concept (PoC) with HERE before fully deploying the solution, which it purchased through AWS Marketplace. Transacting through AWS Marketplace helped streamline the procurement process and improve the timeline to launching the solution. 

Chalo uses HERE Geocoding and Search API for real-time, location-aware suggestions so that places and addresses appear as users type. With HERE Geocoding and Search, Chalo can search for locations and convert results between addresses and geographic coordinates, enhancing location-based services with detailed and accurate data. The service improves the speed and accuracy of search queries. In less than six weeks, Chalo completed its PoC and deployed the new solution with no disruption in services. “Onboarding was smooth because the HERE team had all the documentation and API test environments readily available so we could work quickly,” Bhavnani said. 

To support scalability, Chalo moved 90 percent of its infrastructure to AWS, a decision the company made after AWS provided exceptional commercial support and cost optimization during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We chose to expand our work with AWS because it has been a great strategic partner for us, and because of the reliability and scalability it provides,” Bhavnani said. Chalo uses the virtually limitless capacity of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for cold storage, storing data image blobs, and hosting static websites. The majority of Chalo’s databases are hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which automatically scales up or down without the need for provisioning. With the 99.99 percent uptime of Amazon S3, the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and ease of deployments with Amazon CodeDeploy that supports Chalo’s trip planner services—along with the low latency image delivery provided by Amazon CloudFront—Chalo knew customers would not experience interruptions to service, even during peak periods.  

As a direct result of the improved location accuracy and geographical coverage that HERE offers, paired with the reliability and elasticity of AWS, Chalo has created a consistently positive customer experience—even during the switch to the new platform. “We got all the support we needed, which led to a seamless transition with no disruption to bus riders,” Bhavnani said. The improved functionality led to a 150 percent increase in user click-through rates on our search feature. And in just three months, Chalo saw a 10 percent increase in customer satisfaction and improved the accuracy of search results by 32 percent compared to the previous solution.

“Amazon EC2 has helped us meet customer expectations by easily and cost effectively managing spikes in activity,” Bhavnani said, adding that along with the improved functionality and dependability that HERE provides, Chalo can explore new initiatives that will capitalize on the platform’s data and analytics capabilities. “Chalo is also working on new features such as holistic bus operations monitoring and schedule adherence to provide more value to bus operators,” Bhavnani said. “Eventually, we’ll offer a multimodal experience on the application, such as integrating trains and ‘last mile’ modes like taxis.” Chalo will also work with HERE to improve use of live traffic data with an improved extract, transform, and load algorithm that will boost the prediction accuracy of bus arrivals.

Even while building upon its application, Chalo has continued to expand to new cities, with HERE's mapping solutions integrated as a default part of Chalo's consumer offering in new markets such as the Philippines.