​What can happen in a crisis?

Sweden is two months into the Corona crisis and like everywhere, it has changed our worlds.

We need to live our lives differently and move differently. Some parts of our society are on hold. Other parts like the healthcare sector, are fighting the crisis for our sakes. We, as individuals, are making new prioritizations and finding new habits.

M was created three years ago, with the purpose and ambition to develop a mobility service that would be so easy and smooth to experience, that it could become an alternative to private car ownership for people living in cities. The reasons were obvious with growing cities and cars standing idle 95% or more of the time. The thousands and thousands of interactions with consumers we have had over the past years, tells us that people are ready for new solutions.

M is developed fully in-house and I’m proud of the purpose that our owners, Volvo Cars, decided two years ago: “Freedom to Move”. That is the reason behind their investment in proprietary technology development to understand a new consumer who does not seek ownership, but simply wants to use and get access to a car. M has gathered competence from broad digital service development to help shape a new solution that starts with the user, with the why, and not with the what.

What makes consumers change? For sure a crisis does, because there is no option. There are a lot of things we have stopped doing and long to take back, like hugging friends and seeing our old relatives. But what new behaviours will we keep?

Since the Corona outbreak, we have seen our user base grown both in number of users and the way they use the service. We learn from this data and with more than 30.000 rated journeys, giving us a rating consistently in the range of 4.5-4.7 out of 5, we are fueled by the fact that consumer change only happens when a new alternative is better than the old.

As we are waiting for the business life to come back and to welcome close to thousand companies that have signed up for M, choosing a more sustainable and economical way to solve their transportation needs, we continue to innovate and to interact with our users to further improve the customer experience.

This crisis involves a personal catastrophy and loss for so many people. From a business side, what we can do is to learn from it, to adopt and continue to innovate (now from a distance). That’s how we can fight this together.

Bodil Eriksson, CEO at M | Volvo Car Mobility