People rely heavily on technology in today’s fast-paced environment for everything they do. New technology makes life easier by bringing a wide range of valuable services to our front door. A popular example is an online ride booking platform.

The heart of the taxi service is a sophisticated taxi dispatch algorithm and system, and the best taxi dispatch software gives you limitless options and features for managing taxi drivers, cabs, and clients while enabling you to take appropriate actions based on trip data.

Choosing the best taxi software for your company is important. However, it might also be stressful going through the process of deciding on which one. You’ll require transportation software to accommodate your expansion without breaking the bank, especially if you start with a small fleet.

For all your needs related to operating a transportation company, know that SmartMove Systems has got your back!

Call Center Add-on Delivers Service Excellence

One of the essential advantages of using a customer care call center is the opportunity to expand and serve your consumer base. A call center puts your online ride booking software business on the other end when a consumer has a problem with one of your goods or services.

You may already be aware that a contact center can assist companies in offering particular customer care. They ensure a great user experience across all devices and channels, including calls, emails, live chat messages, SMS texts, and support requests.

In the transportation sector, there is fierce competition to survive. More than just providing your consumers with good service is required. They search for the most excellent offers and procedures at the most affordable costs.

Your main priority should be your clients and passenger solutions. Your online ride booking software needs a phone answering service team to manage all the calls. They will be accessible around the clock to take reservations and address client issues. You will find it simple to operate several calls at once. Through this, your company will appear more professional.

SmartVoix by SmartMove

The SmartMove booking and dispatch system also integrates easily with the feature-rich phone system known as SmartVoix. Call centers can increase efficiency, dependability, and traceability through this system. It automates routine processes and removes data entry errors.

Additionally, it logs all calls and connects them to the initial reservation. This function offers an excellent quality control measure. With SmartVoix, you can expedite bookings using “interactive voice response,” or IVR.

By using the caller’s phone number and previously captured caller information, SmartVoix can identify the caller. To give essential callers priority, it also offers enhanced call queuing. As a result, SmartVoix provides more excellent capabilities and enables you to make more precise reservations.

If you have any inquiries regarding online ride booking software or call center services, SmartMove Systems can help. Our knowledgeable dispatchers, accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, will take care of all your taxi booking needs.

Online Ride Booking Software Safety Advantages

Most consumers are unaware that the majority of online ride booking software just functions as call centers connecting potential customers with authorized drivers. And as a result, they have little control over the vehicles. 

Taxi dispatch software services are supposed to be a safe option for people looking for a secure mode of transportation. It’s crucial, especially in today’s world, where security is a significant concern. Still, sadly, both passengers and drivers are experiencing problems. 

Fortunately, a feature like Emergency triggers can help to resolve this worrying issue. We can install a hidden button in the vehicle that sends a distress signal. The driver can push the button discreetly with no alarm or notification to the customer.

When the driver presses the button, they can immediately reach customer service, and the call center can swiftly take action. In cases where a driver or passenger is in danger and needs a rapid safety response, they can use the emergency trigger.

Develop a custom strategy with us based on your fleet size. We can handle fleets of just 2 vehicles to 200+ and more! Experience SmartMove Systems, and watch as your company soars to new heights.

Schedule a demo today and learn more!

What makes Taxi Booking Software important in today’s market?

According to Transparency Market Research: “Taxi booking software helps users to build a mobile-based taxi booking solution to manage the taxi business online. Taxi booking software controls all the operations or functions from a centralized system. The software provides significant business insights in terms of reports and helps users to track & monitor the progress of the business.”

Power Up Productivity: Taxi Booking Software System in Review

There are a lot of Software Solutions out there that promise features for every cab in the fleet, but fleet operations aren’t just about how many features there are, but how well they work together to deliver solid productivity with the booking experience of passengers or customers.

Breaking into a mature market like passenger transport needs a company with the experience and all-in-one-solution that works with startups or companies trying to break into better market share.

1. The Complete Passenger Taxi Booking Experience

The feature that impacts your bottom line first, above all, is the experience provided to your passengers and customers as the passenger experience impacts the momentum of your growth and the cost of acquiring new customers.

So how does this work with SmartMove? The passenger booking software is focused on ease of use for a smoother transaction and positive effect.

SmartMove’s software solution, the SmartHail passenger booking app, comes available as part of the package. Its generic form has the same functionality, but can be whitelisted. In other words, the User Interface and how it’s presented such as colors, accents, etc., can be customized for your brand and fleet to better distinguish yourself in the market.

SmartHail can be used for food or packages or for personal rides especially with regard to tracking orders, deliveries, and rides. In other words, one app can help your fleet be monetized in different income streams. Take advantage of the mammoth growth of food delivery as well as maintaining fleet operations.

 But whichever version of SmartHail you avail, the best features that they come with are:

• No login after initial set up
• Fare estimates
• ETA and car tracking
• Pay using the app
• Deliveries – order food and goods for collection and delivery through your app
• Promo codes and vouchers
• Upfront payment authentication
• Choice of vehicle
• Select prefilled pick up or destinations based on the travel history
• Book for immediate pickup or pre-book
• Accurate ETAs
• Driver Tracking
• Rate and review the driver
• Digital receipts
• Safe ride tracking – send a link to a friend to track your arrival
  

Individually, these are great features to have, but together, they accomplish broadly three goals that taxi companies would have a hard time without taxi booking & dispatch software: facilitating payments, simplifying the booking process, and driver & passenger monitoring.

The first two reduces friction and increases revenue, and the third helps with information gathering for better fleet management.

2. Driver & Passenger Anonymity & Safety

Now, a more specific feature that enhances the customer experience and saves fleets time and money is ride tracking. This feature allows the passenger and driver to communicate anonymously and gives both the safety and peace of mind needed when other services have heightened rates of crime committed against passengers and drivers. 

SmartHail’s tracking feature also allows for a tracking link that can be forwarded to family or friends, so they can track the taxi ride on a live map.

Ride tracking is a useful feature in itself since it can help the driver find the passenger or vice-versa. SMS tracking allows the driver to verify if the passenger will still continue with the ride in cases of pre-booking or sudden cancellations.

All in all, this feature alone saves on dead miles and reduces wait times which increases revenue capacity and productivity.

3. Account Portal

On their own, taxis working blindly without software get less passengers because they may be unaware of better areas for pickup and shorter routes for customers. They may also waste time waiting in locations with little to no passengers. 

Dispatching and Booking software solves opportunity costs and inefficiencies, and helps gather data for better mapping of lucrative times, areas, and services.

Enter the SmartMove Account Portal. As part of the SmartMove Passenger App, the account portal allows passengers to book in ways that on-demand and traditional methods cannot, which in other words, are more opportunities to generate revenue and save on waste. In particular, customers can:

• Customize their portal to make and manage their own bookings
• Create multiple bookings at a time
• View scheduled bookings and booking history
• Manage (edit/cancel) bookings without any Call Center intervention from the portal

The Account Portal is also a feature accessible to Taxi Service Providers using SmartMove’s Dispatch Systems. This allows providers to:

• Manage and control their client or account customer budgets using the customizable portal
• Easily create multiple bookings for each client and manage them
• Set up travel budgets for each client and enable automatic deduction of fare after each trip
• Receive a warning when the set threshold as per budget has been reached
• Limit pickup or destination options for particular clients
• Limit booking times to only allow travel at certain times

These features for providers are a great way to manage corporate clients or public sector clients and their passengers. This has the added benefit of managing expectations on the kind of revenue generated.

When your current system has none of these features and benefits, it’s a good idea to consider an upgrade.

4. Seamless Payment Functions

Providing the service well, and making it easily accessible to customers, is one part of the equation. But equally important if not more so is ensuring that customers pay easily so that potential income is realized.

SmartMove enables a variety of payment options as well as provides a digital receipt that is also reflected with a driver’s copy, allowing for better revenue tracking.

SmartMove’s payment process is intuitive and painless which includes:

• Credit card
• Cash
• App payment – SmartHail
• Vouchers
• Accounts
• Subsidy – for public sector passengers

This ensures that the maximum possible customers are available for the company.

For a different look and different review perspective on dispatching: Taxi Cab Technology: Dispatch Software Review

5. Tight Integration

The last feature is the comprehensive integrated nature of SmartMove’s Software. Booking and Dispatch aren’t separate but designed to work seamlessly together to be as efficient as possible while hitting two birds with one stone.

A great example of this is the payment system generating a digital invoice and receipt which is a feature appreciated by passengers. While at the same time, the system records this information and creates a driver version that breaks down their share of the income earned. And this is further integrated with how the same information is processed in a comprehensive record for the Accounting Department that takes into account regulations and legal requirements.

Lastly, SmartMove’s system can generate customized reports that front-line staff or management can use for their reports or presentations.

All from one transaction, the system makes the smart move.

Learn more about Taxi Booking Software and book a demo of how it works.

To properly strategize for start-ups or a small fleet, examining the fundamental needs of the business is in order. A staple in business schools and various strategists of all stripes has been Sun Tzu’s Art Of War.

And it had a gem worth living by: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

So in a nutshell, we need to know more to make better decisions, and we do that by identifying the present challenges facing start-ups and small fleets. That’s how a business strategy for taxi start-ups gets built.

If you’re starting out from scratch, here’s some food for thought:

Knowing Yourself

While there are a multitude of things to pay attention to in business, we’ll take a look at some challenges that a taxi start-up should consider when pursuing growth.

60 Second Summary Video of SmartMove Systems:

Profitability

The first and foremost consideration that makes all the others possible is profitability. There have been several ways to traditionally monetize aspects of a taxi business such as selling ad space to show on top of a vehicle or behind it and that’s still valid when feasible. There are also new business models that rely more on outside funding to sustain operations instead of organically being profitable like with ride-share companies.

The important thing when it comes to profitability is deciding how and when to be profitable. The ‘how’ means deciding the aspect of the business that makes money, and for taxi businesses, it can be finding out which areas are more profitable to have more cars in. The ‘when’ is typically related to your Return On Investment (ROI) which Investopedia states: “tells you how much money you’ve made (or lost) an investment or project after accounting for its cost.”

But more than that, a good rule of thumb to review your profitability is in the 2nd year and 5th year of operations as JP Morgan Chase notes in their research that a third of businesses quit in the second year and nearly half of all new businesses exit in their 5th year. 

When making business decisions with profitability in mind, see how these decisions can pay for themselves. For example, SmartMove’s lower cost, extensive features, and efficient & accurate reporting ticks all of the boxes including Sun Tzu’s advice about knowing yourself as a path to victory.

Staffing

The next important aspect in the taxi business is staffing — partly because, conceptually, you need to be able to trust those that work with you and for you, and partly because any enterprise that does not know its people might neglect those who deliver performance, and might keep dead wood.

The way to take care of your staff is to factor in pay, benefits, and working conditions for your drivers and management staff. Oftentimes, it’s more prudent to outsource customer service calls as they constitute a different kind of service that also requires a different set of pay, benefits, and accounting for working conditions which all require valuable time and resources that would be better spent on the core aspects of your start-up.

On that note, SmartMove provides a solution as call center operations are included and integrated in the service and can work with your own in-house call center should you wish to have your own in the future.

As noted in a book by the Transportation Research Board, compensation is the main detail that gets drivers, but it wasn’t just purely the numbers as compensation included earnings, benefits, and payment practices.

As for earnings, it might be a good idea to reference publicly available pay data as well as find out from competitors to get an edge in finding talent.

With respect to benefits, they come in two flavors: state mandated and employer provided. The former needs to be complied with so it’s important to get all above board, while juggling the conflicting needs of the staff, the state, the business, and the clients.

Now, the two dominant types in payment practices are the ‘percentage per ride deduction’ and the flat per-day/per-week lease fee, and it’s been shown that drivers have preferred the former. So to attract drivers, a percentage basis is preferable but such a system requires some software integration in the cars and the fleet operations. So another strategy for taxi start-ups here would be to use dispatch software that can record and account for rides accurately.

Customer Acquisition

The lifeblood of the business is in the customers, and while it sounds like common sense, it will take data-driven decision making to truly understand the cost of acquiring a new customer and retaining an existing one.

There are many a business strategy for taxi start-ups to find when it comes to this, and customer acquisition costs can be broadly divided into two categories: marketing expenses (ads, discounts, vouchers, social media, SEO) and operational expenses (incentives for drivers to take more rides).

While it’s important to research what works in this aspect, it’s also important to use the data generated from the business itself. Market research can be pretty expensive, and data like that can be found almost free in unexpected places like customer complaints, data generated from the dispatch software, driver inputs, and more. Integrated software solutions with many features can tie in together the different data to expand the bigger picture.

Customer’s Standards & Expectations

Last but not least, another consideration to know about as a start-up is what customers want. It’s become clear that app-based transportation is now the norm, and a lot of software-based features are expected of any modern sophisticated cab.

Features like tracking their rides, multiple payment options, and more are available with SmartMove’s SmartHail passenger app that can be white labeled to cultivate your brand.

Making the SmartMove

In each and every strategy for taxi start-ups, a lot of the success hinges on making informed business decisions. And the way forward to that is adopting a comprehensive all-in-one software solution that integrates the features and functions together to work seamlessly, efficiently, and affordably.

Make the SmartMove and book a demo today to find out more about how these challenges can be solved.