Raayi, the region’s first-of-its-kind crowdsourced recommendations and reviews app, recently affirmed Dubai’s position amongst the global leaders in implementing digital applications. In making the assertion, the company cited the emirate’s state-of-the-art and innovative smart applications rolled out across its key sectors, as well as the Dubai Government’s ramped-up digital transformation efforts.
In line with this development, Raayi announced a series of enhancements to its digital platform to boost total user experience and community engagement.
The announcement was made against the backdrop of the increasing influence of online reviews and recommendation portals on customers’ purchasing decisions. Key improvements in Raayi are set to strengthen some of its existing features as well as introduce new and more interactive functionalities.
At the heart of the revamp is the introduction of the Inspiration Hub, a content-rich, direct peer-to-peer zone that gives users easy access to recommended businesses depending on what the user is looking for and based on others’ experiences.
The first element of this hub is an improved Curations feature. Raayi’s Curations allow users to create and share their lists of recommended businesses across all industries. This feature makes it easier to find must-try outlets in Dubai.
Complementing the Curations function are Expert Write-ups and users’ Polls. The Expert Write-ups feature consists of Raayi’s partner experts providing detailed insights into some of the most important purchasing topics in the emirate. Their goal is to arm customers with the right and relevant information pertaining to their planned purchases.
Polls, on the other hand, serves as an interactive channel enabling users to share their views on products, services and businesses by ranking them accordingly. This function takes the pulse of the community by allowing users to vote for their preferred businesses in any of the ongoing polls, ultimately determining which business the Raayi users feel is the most highly recommended.
Other deployed features include the Activity Log and the Community Board. The Activity Log keeps users up to date about the recommendations of their friends and other people they follow on the app. The Community Board, meanwhile, is a functionality that allows Raayi users to assist and engage with each other by posing and answering questions relevant to the community.
Finally, the exciting new My Community feature has been introduced to help personalize the Raayi experience. Under My Community,users can select the people they want to follow, allowing them to filter through Raayi information and only see the posts of their friends or the people whose opinions they trust. It demonstrates Raayi’s efforts to meet individuals’ tastes and preferences, as well as provide users with access to information and opinions from their most trusted network.
Stefan Toubia, Founder and CEO of Raayi, said: “Since Raayi’s launch, we have been planning to continuously expand the app’s capabilities to cater to the evolving needs of the Dubai community. We are confident that the new features will further increase engagements and interactions on Raayi and, more importantly, empower its users. Our ultimate mission is to help consumers make better and smarter purchasing decisions, a goal that is reflected in all of these exciting new features.”
Toubia added, “We will not stop with the enhancements. As wego forward, more integrations will be made in cooperation with other review platforms so that our users will have access to all information they need in one place.”
Raayi recently added a smart aggregation function that fetches reviews from popular sources such as Google and display them in one feed to streamline and simplify content consumption. Customers do not have to dig through online reviews manually, depend on their hunches, or limit their sources to their inner circles only.
Additionally, aggregated reviews can serve as marketing intelligence, helping companies to keep abreast of latest trends in their industries and compare their performance with that of their key competitors.
“All these new features will provide Raayi’s users, customers and businesses with convenient unified access to a wider variety of content. For customers, this means access to more comprehensive and useful input about various products and services that will help them in their buying decisions. Businesses can use these features to easily monitor, analyse and manage customer feedback. With these new features, Raayihas effectively strengthened its position as a comprehensive hub for crowdsourced recommendations and reviews of businesses across industries,” added Toubia.
Raayi, an app by the community for the community, was launched in Dubai to connect businesses and customers from all industries.