As environmental and economic awareness grows, ride-sharing and taxi services are becoming more and more lucrative. These ride-hailing businesses are also increasingly moving online, leveraging the internet to reach customers more effectively.
Let’s take a peek at this burgeoning market and understand how ride-hailing software can help bolster your return on investment.
Taxi Dispatch
Simply speaking, a taxi is a vehicle that is chartered for the express purpose of moving a customer from one place to another. Almost all major cities worldwide have their own unique and traditional taxi services, from the famous London taxicabs to the iconic yellow Ambassadors of Kolkata.
These professions are passed down from father to son almost like an art form, indelible parts of the region’s cultural heritage. However, new-age taxi services are popping up all over the world, leveraging modern technologies and paradigms.
One of the innovations appropriated by companies like Ola and Uber is taxi dispatch software or, more formally, cloud-based taxi dispatch systems.
These comprehensive suites provide a wide variety of tools to the employer to manage their business, from fare calculation to GPS tracking to feedback collection.
The systems often also come equipped with downloadable driver and customer-side apps, which provide customized features like digital wallets, ride-hailing and tracking, helpdesk functionality, and safety features.
The best taxi dispatch systems on the market are often those developed in-house by large companies, custom-made to their needs. However, not all businesses have the funding and expertise to pull it off.
Luckily, with some tweaking, many commercially available options can secure a place beside the best taxi booking and dispatch software solutions in gross functionality.
How Does a Ride-Hailing App Help Your Business?
Ride-hailing systems can take your taxi dispatch business to the next level. They do this in a few ways:
Efficiency: They allow you to efficiently and accurately keep track of your finances, availability, and performance metrics. Some high-grade programs even provide in-built data analytics to help you act on this information.
Productivity: By providing constant GPS tracking and fare accounting services, taxi dispatch software enables you to closely monitor your employees and prevent unproductive and/or fraudulent behavior. This will let you eliminate inefficiency costs and slim down your wasteful expenditure.
Legitimacy: A ride-hailing business will be perceived to be more professional and approachable if it implements software solutions. Customers seek to maximize comfort for their expenditure, and part of this comfort comes from trust in the service provider.
A ride-hailing solution denotes that you have sunk some cost into the business and provides market-standard service, which will cement your position in their eyes.
What to Look for in a Taxi Dispatch Software
There are many software options available on the market today for cloud-based taxi dispatch systems. In such a situation, it becomes necessary for ride-hailing businesses like yours to know how to pick the best taxi booking and dispatch software. Here are some of the features you should look out for.
Booking: One of the most basic services such a system can offer is the ability for your customers to book rides. The system should process bookings efficiently, allow for proper pick-up and drop-point setup, and integrate well with client-side GPS and location services.
Payments: Ideally, the ride-hailing software should integrate payment gateways to allow customers to seamlessly pay for their services in methods other than direct cash handover. In an era dominated by more and more digital payment solutions, customers are paying less and less often with cash.
Your solution should be able to interface with debit cards, credit cards, net banking, peer-to-peer systems like UPI, and digital wallets. New-age systems also include the option to convert currency into their own internal exchange medium, which can then be used freely to avail the dispatch services. Cryptocurrency is also becoming an acceptable payment medium.
Monitoring: Alongside the ability to book and pay, the solution should also allow you to view and monitor the transactions and activities happening. This includes GPS information, fare rates, and amounts, driver and vehicle registration, customer verification and analytics, and other such data points.
Logistics: The best taxi dispatch systems should be able to provide you with complete logistical data about your rolling stock, whether you are working on an ownership model or a partner-based model like Ola or Uber.
Your system should maintain a database of registered vehicles, their owners, and their drivers, along with their identification and documents to maintain records and legal compliance requirements. It should also be able to handle KYC functions if necessary.
User-side Applications: The software package should come integrated with apps that are usable by your clients and employees and that fulfill their requirements well. Driver-side apps should have order distribution and management functions, payment calculators, contact and dispute resolution services, and GPS-enabled route tracking, among other functions.
Clients should have access to an accessible booking and payment interface, FAQ and help options, GPS-enabled ride tracking, driver and vehicle identification, and fare calculation.
Conclusion
Thus, a cloud-based dispatch system can really elevate the return on investment for your ride-hailing business and improve the services you can provide to your valued customers.
There are many commercial software integrations and packages available for purchase, some excellent and some downright scams. Always do your research before investing in any such management aid, and be aware of your requirements.
Author – Bio
Mushahid Khatri is the Chief Executive Officer of Yelowsoft, one of the leading On-demand delivery solution providers. He is a visionary leader who believes in imparting his profound knowledge that leans on business and entrepreneurship.
