[mrbrowning]

What I wonder about Lyft is the extent to which friendliness scales. That it has scaled so far is obviously due to the fact that they can simply project that sense of friendliness and then rely on individual drivers to actually do the work of giving that impression to customers, but what if they want to expand their business into domains where friendliness is unimportant or even a downside (an example might be something like the bike messaging that Uber is getting into in NYC, where prompt service basically requires the service provider to be brusque)? In such a market, the company wouldn't be able to trade on their reputation as the friendly alternative and in fact might be even harmed by the expectation that they would be that. Is friendliness a straightjacket in the making?

[iambateman]

1. Friendliness is always important in customer interaction. 2. Chick-fil-A is an example of "friendliness" scaling up to x0,000 employees. 3. No, being nice is not a straightjacket in the making.

[mrbrowning]

Of course, but I'm not talking about mere interpersonal politeness so much as having friendliness be a central component of your branding. Chick-Fil-A, for all its vaunted good cheer, still has all the trappings of a commercial transaction, whereas Lyft tries to downplay that in favor of appearing as merely a facilitator of intra-community interactions. That part, specifically, is the part that I wonder about.

[starfishjenga]

Yeah, super friendly - unless you're gay!

[sp332]

The one near me sponsors a pride parade every year, so I guess some things don't scale that well :p

[vivekpreddy]

In my experience the friendliness permeates the entire company. Lyft (as opposed to Uber) has heavily invested in Customer Service that is absolutely top notch. To my knowledge, this is a quality they actively look for in every hire they make regardless of whether that's a driver or a developer.