Vidhya Duthaluru to head Uber’s global customer care platform

San Francisco headquartered online ride hailing platform Uber has promoted Vidhya Duthaluru to global engineering head for the company’s customer care platform. 

Duthaluru, who will be based in Bengaluru, will lead teams in Uber’s Bay Area and Bengaluru technology centres to improve customer support experiences and feedback mechanisms for its users, a company statement said.

She was earlier the director of engineering in Bengaluru for the company, which she joined in August 2018. Since then, she has scaled up the team at Uber Bengaluru to more than 70 employees, who have delivered several in-app support features through automation and developed tools for  the company’s customer support executives. 

“I am thrilled to have Vidhya lead the global customer obsession engineering team as we embark on our next phase of growth. Vidhya has a strong track record of leading the customer obsession team in Bengaluru and delivering innovative and high-impact functionality. I look forward to Vidhya’s leadership to bring new industry-leading technology into this exciting area as we continue to scale the team.” Jennifer Anderson, senior director of engineering at Uber, said.

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Duthaluru is one of the few technologists to have worked with speech recognition and natural language understanding from early days of these technologies, the statement said.

She has about 25 years of experience in managing and running projects globally with cross-regional teams, and has worked in companies such as Nynex Science and Technology, Nuance Communications, IBM, BeVocal and [24]7.ai.

Duthaluru is an engineering graduate from the University of Mumbai, and went on to complete her MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from US-based Rutgers University. 

The company’s Bengaluru and Hyderabad technology centres are global centres that aim to improve user experience for riders, drivers, customers, delivery persons and restaurants globally. These centres house engineering, product, design, research, data science and engineering operations.  

Read: Shared mobility major Uber pumps $246 mn into India arm

In January, Uber announced new safety features on the app, which include a four-digit verifiable pin, ride-check for detours and stopped rides, as well as an option to auto-record conversations during a trip on both the rider and driver side for the India market.