Driver Gifts was a hospitality platform that I created for Lyft which enabled Drivers to gift their passengers $5 off their next ride, in real-time, through the driver-app.

Empowering Lyft’s hundreds of thousands of Drivers to act as agents of hospitality, they could give a gift if they missed a turn, were stuck in traffic. or just really liked their passenger. Driving for Lyft is a stressful job, and Driver Gifts made things a bit easer for drivers while simultaneously delighting passengers. Our ROI funnel tracked Driver Retention and Rider Loyalty.

I came up with the idea for Driver Gifts based upon an insight from a book I was reading called The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. Dissecting the anatomy of building a “Peak Moment,” in a consumer journey, the book tells the story of an unorthodox “loyalty” program at Pret A Manger (thing Starbucks), where the baristas could gift one free cup of coffee to a customer per day, at their own discretion. In piloting the program, Pret A Manger cohorted the baristas who gifted cups of coffee, tracking retention, and the customers who received free coffee, tracking purchase behavior, and showed a stat-sig increase across the board.