The Uber transport application becomes increasingly popular in Latin America, but behind what for the user is a simple request for a service, there are hundreds of workers solving from security problems to particular cases such as the forgetting of a baby in a vehicle.

That is the work of the nine Centers of Excellence (CoE) of the company, one of them located in Costa Rica, the second largest of the company and from where the Latin American market is supported (except Brazil and Costa Rica) and part of North America.

The Center of Excellence in Costa Rica, which operates 24 hours a day and has 128,000 annual interactions with users and drivers, employs 480 young people aged 24 years old on average. The company expects to raise its CoE payroll to 600 workers in 2018.

The leader of the Centers of Excellence of Uber for Latin America, Juan Araya, told that this region is the most important of the operation of the company and therefore it is vital the constant innovation and the development of processes for the attention of incidents .

According to Araya, Latin America is Uber's main market with 30 million users in 179 cities, one million affiliated drivers and 2,000 workers in the CoE of Costa Rica, Brazil and other dependencies of the company.

In Latin America there are also three of the five cities in the world where Uber is most used: Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico.

The CoE of Costa Rica is divided into 12 support areas whose mission is to prevent security incidents and fraud, help in case of traffic accidents, altercations and recover lost objects; as well as generating data to improve the service and develop processes for new products.

The workers of the CoE have cataloged 110 types of incidents and have developed 81 processes to solve them.

One of the strangest cases in Latin American cities that has attended the CoE is the neglect of a baby in a vehicle, which was quickly recovered by his mother after reporting the incident and coordinating with the driver.

According to Uber data, in the more than 15 countries of Latin America in which the transport app operates, 19,000 cases of lost items are reported weekly, of which 93 percent are recovered.

The forgotten objects in the vehicles range from wallets, mobile phones and backpacks, to strange cases like the baby, dogs, a wedding dress and a 55-inch television screen.

Another special case was that of a driver in Colombia who fell to a precipice and did not know where he was, before which he tried to communicate with his family and the authorities, but was located through Alejandro Vargas, a young man who works in the CoE from Costa Rica.

The driver wrote a help message through the app and was received by Vargas, who immediately located it through the positioning tools used by the company and helped guide the authorities to rescue him.

"At first I was very afraid but it is a great satisfaction to have been able to help save his life," Vargas said.

The work that young people do in Costa Rica's CoE has a particularity: it can not support drivers and users in this country because the transport service has been declared illegal by the Government.

However, the offices of the company and the CoE are legally constituted since 2016 and comply with the government requirements to operate in a free zone and support the rest of Latin American countries.

According to the company's data, San José is one of the cities with the highest penetration of the Uber service in the world.

"The company is totally legal; the service is not regulated. There is no innovation that comes along with its regulation, "said the manager of Communication of Uber for the Andean, Central and Caribbean region, Martha Castro.

The company has entered into dialogues with the Government, and in the Legislative Assembly there are legal initiatives to regulate this type of transport services, but apparently everything will remain in the hands of the new president, who will be elected in the second round on April 1 and that will begin to govern on May 8 next.

FUENTE