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There is space for scores of people in a section of Uber’s office in downtown Phoenix but on a recent weekday morning only a handful of seats are filled, with workers clicking through screens and conducting phone interviews in calm, quiet tones.

If an Uber passenger or driver anywhere in the US or Canada has a problem during a ride, from a lewd remark or unwanted touch to a car crash or physical assault, their report is routed to this office.

Of the 600 people who work here on customer service, around 130 focus exclusively on safety investigations.

From the young staff, many in their twenties and thirties, with flashes of tattoos and brightly dyed hair, this could be Uber’s main San Francisco office. But instead of using data to refine algorithms matching passengers and food deliveries to drivers, these employees are tasked with managing the sometimes devastating consequences when things go wrong.

Safety is big challenge ahead of IPO

As Uber heads towards a planned 2019 initial public offering that could value it at more than $100bn, safety remains one of its biggest challenges, and for the broader ride-hailing industry.

Uber and its peers, including Lyft in the US, China’s Didi Chuxing and India’s Ola, have struggled with what happens when you put strangers together in cars, from sexual assaults and traffic collisions to murder.

It is a similar problem that faces companies such as Airbnb, online dating apps, hotels, airlines and cruise operators. But Uber’s dominance in the US ride-hailing market, its poor history of handling complaints and its slowness to grasp the severity of its safety risks has put it under a spotlight.

Over the past year, as part of chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi’s efforts to convince customers, regulators and investors that Uber “does the right thing, period”, the company has added safety features to its app and resolved a lawsuit brought by women who said they were raped or assaulted by Uber drivers.

It has also made changes behind the scenes in how it handles serious incidents, starting with the specialised safety team in Phoenix, launched with 23 people in July 2017. It says it is rolling out lessons and training to similar teams managing safety around the world. Like other tech companies, Uber has found it needs to step up its spending on people to handle the real-world impact of its products.

Complaints process

The Phoenix team is divided into two. In one section of the office, 60 triage agents are the first point of contact when a complaint arrives. These may come through a comment left by a passenger or driver after a ride occurs, a report through the company’s website, a call to its critical safety hotline, or other channels.

Uber uses an algorithm to scan the hundreds of thousands of customer service tickets and comments it receives each day and flag to a triage agent potentially serious issues based on keywords such as “touch” or “gun”.

For claims deemed urgent — crashes, physical altercations, sexual assault or misconduct, theft, stalking after a ride is over and other serious matters — the triage agent suspends the accused person’s access to Uber and calls the person making the claim for further information.

These conversations are delicate. The Uber representative may be the first person someone speaks to after a traumatic event that might have happened just moments before.

Agents say they try to convey, through tone and words, that they are listening and are sorry for what the caller has gone through. They try not to talk over them. They try to elicit specific information with empathy and without sounding like they are reading from a script. Where was the person sitting in the car? Was anyone else there?

‘We haven’t always got it right’

Agents provide contact information for counselling resources and rape crisis centres. They also give assurances that the company is taking the report seriously. Callers are told the person in question will not ride or drive on the platform until an investigation is completed. They may tell the person that in cases like theirs, a driver or passenger may be banned altogether — something previous company policy barred them from saying.

“We haven’t always got it right. Training was a challenge before the inception of understanding what the severity level of these incident types are,” said Buddy Loomis, a former special agent in the Arizona attorney-general’s office who leads the specialised safety team.

Uber has turned to experts on sexual assault and domestic violence, victim advocates and people with backgrounds in criminal justice and law enforcement for guidance on how it trains customer service agents.

“Our specialists who are dealing with a lost item, we’re going to train them a certain way. But the folks who are dealing with these safety incidents, we’re training them in not only how to speak on the phone to a reporting party, how to understand and listen to the incident but also to understand the context,” Ms Loomis said.

Investigators get other side of story

After triage, urgent cases are passed to a 65-strong team of investigators. This will soon expand to 85. They may contact the person who made the complaint, but they are also tasked with getting the other side of the story.

Before making that call, the agent reviews the history of the accused party. Have there been previous complaints or potentially troubling feedback? How long has the person been using or driving for Uber and what is their rating?

They also turn to evidence such as GPS data that Uber records on every ride and in-car video footage, if the driver makes it available. This background will help inform whether the ban, which the company calls a “deactivation”, will become permanent.

These calls can also be emotional or fraught, but agents say they try to keep their own biases and emotions out of their work. They inform the accused party that he or she has been the subject of a complaint. They ask if they remember their recent rides. If they cannot reach the accused person, they leave messages and send emails telling them their account has been suspended and asking them to call in.

In many cases, the decision to kick someone off the platform or not comes down to the individual investigator, based on the evidence gathered in the investigation. In others they are elevated to a team leader or executive leadership.

In cases of sexual misconduct or assault, Uber does not report incidents to law enforcement, following advice from advocates and survivors. It will contact police to report incidents involving the threat of harm and other public safety issues.

The backgrounds of the Phoenix team are diverse, with some having experience of crisis management, others of social work or investigations. Once they have completed training and are cleared to field calls, investigators handle around 15 cases at any given time.

Cases can take days, but Uber says that 80 per cent of the time, it is able to contact the person making a complaint within an hour, an improvement from a few years ago when it might have taken days to respond to someone alleging serious harm.

Complaints classified to help compile data

The Phoenix safety team has recently introduced a new “taxonomy” — 21 categories defining sexual misconduct and assault that Uber has developed with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and the Urban Institute.

By codifying complaints from staring or leering and indecent exposure to non-consensual sexual penetration, Uber says it can respond more consistently and understand the warning signs that might indicate a driver or passenger may commit more serious offences.

“The taxonomy takes the full range of behaviours, puts them in usable and comprehensible scale and applies it across customer service representatives to create consistent data so you are comparing apples to apples,” said Tina Tchen, a member of Uber’s safety advisory board and former Obama administration official who co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which helps victims of sexual harassment and abuse.

“To really get to the root of problems, you can’t solve things you can’t see,” she said. “Do we have a part at a certain time of night, in certain parts of a city or rural areas? That gives both Uber and the broader community in which Uber operates the opportunity to see what further steps could be taken.”

First safety report due soon

The taxonomy enables Uber to collect data for a safety transparency report it has promised to publish next year disclosing how frequently the most serious safety incidents occur, from sexual assaults to traffic fatalities.

The report will begin to answer long-running demands that ride-hailing companies be more forthright about safety and risk. There are no comprehensive statistics on the number of sexual assaults and other serious incidents that occur or are alleged involving ride-hailing providers or traditional taxi companies.

But depending how large the numbers are, the report may prompt calls for Uber to scale up its safety response beyond the expansion it is planning. For a company that says it hopes to reach 1bn users, it is unclear whether the current number of agents will be enough.

When Uber announced earlier this year it would begin disclosing safety data, it said it hoped other companies would follow. Lyft quickly said it would release its own report, but has not set a timeframe for doing so. The company is reviewing Uber’s taxonomy and determining how it will compile its data.

Other companies taking action

“The reality is if you really want to move the needle on sexual violence in the travel and transportation industry, you really want to make women safer, you really want to enhance safety and promote mobility, then it can’t just be Uber,” said Tony West, Uber’s general counsel.

Uber acknowledges that the report will be sobering. The company says that in the US, reports of serious incidents comprise less than 1 per cent of the customer service complaints it receives. But the scale of its business means the total number is large: the company did 2.5bn rides in the US in the past two years alone.

“I think the numbers are going to be disturbing because anything over one is disturbing, but then when you think about the fact that we do 100m rides a week around the world, it’s a lot of rides,” Mr West said.

The company’s executives and advisers have also warned that the numbers are likely to go up initially as more people become comfortable reporting problems, particularly sexual assault and misconduct.

“Because this is such an under-reported crime, it’s going to take us years to fully capture,” Ms Tchen said. “For a good period of time the number of reports will go up, which should be considered a good thing because it means people trust the system. It’ll be a challenge for a business like Uber, but I think it’s an important step.”

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