Uber introduces Compliments, allowing riders to give their driver private feedback via pre-made stickers or custom thank you notes
Starting today, when you give your Uber driver a five-star rating, your app will ask you to provide them a little extra feedback.
Context & Ripple Effects
Compliments lands six months after Uber moved its customer support into the app globally, and it extends the same logic from complaint-handling to praise: feedback becomes an always-on in-app product rather than something mediated by email or tip culture alone. The feature sits on top of the existing five-star flow, triggered only when a rider rates highly.
First-order effects
- Drivers gain a private praise channel that is decoupled from the public star rating — riders who want to recognize good service no longer have to encode it in stars, which also protects drivers' averages from noise.
Second-order effects
- The sticker-and-note format becomes a template Uber reuses across its businesses: within a year it ships granular restaurant and per-menu-item ratings for UberEATS, and it starts making rider ratings more visible in-app to nudge passenger behavior too.
Third-order effects
- Feedback on the platform turns bidirectional and granular — culminating in Uber letting riders see their own average-rating breakdowns — so reputation data becomes a management layer over both sides of the marketplace, not just a driver scorecard.
The trend: Ride-hailing platforms are replacing blunt star ratings with layered, multi-directional feedback systems that double as labor- and customer-management tools.