Taxi Driver Online

Hi all, Im condidering buying a despatch system from cabdespatch in margate.

Has anyone had any sort of dealings with them ?

all help apreciated

cheers

In 22 years of driving cabs mate I've never heard of them. It's the same old thing with dispatch software mate there's a few who know what they are doing and are on button with things, then there's the others who know F*** all about Taxi work.

Give Bill a nudge who posts on here under Bill Datamaster, he's been going for the best part of 20 years, his system is simple and easy to use and earns you money. It's not like the others who have you running all over the place for nothing.

Please please please avoid Excel Management at all costs, if you have that system in you'll hemorrhage work on a grand scale, I wouldn't recommend them to my worse enemy.

We're about to go with Datamaster having been with Autocab for the past 7 years, I have never come across a more honest bunch of people than the guys at Datamaster, they will sell you a complete system for the cost of an Autocab "add on". Check out their website www.datamaster.co.uk what you see is what you get and also what you pay, there are no hidden extras with these guys. I can't wait to get our system up and running.

Oh you little liar Tommy

Hi,

I’m Bob Evans and I’m the Sales Director with CabDespatch. I was checking our Google rankings and came across this post so registered to introduce myself.

Just to reply to the post that people have never heard of us and it’s best to buy from someone with experience in the trade, I’d like to just give a short history of myself and CabDespatch as well. This isn’t meant to be an advert and apologies if it reads like that, I just like people to know who we are!

My personal history is that I first started cab driving 32 years ago and bought my first private hire office 30 years ago. I’m still at that cab office which is now one of the busiest and largest cab companies in East Kent. I’ve also bought, built-up and sold other cab offices and companies in Kent and London throughout this period.

In 1981 I had my first custom-written software developed and was the first office in my area to be computerized, this was when the PCs in the office still cost a couple of grand each! Whilst I had this system one of the current software companies even canvassed me and were wanting to purchase the system I had as it was more advanced than theirs at the time!

Moving on a few years and wanting to go onto data, I bought an off-the-shelf system from a company which gave us data despatch over PMR and then years after that changed systems again to a Windows based despatch system initially with PMR data and then staying with the same supplier but moving onto GPRS PDAs, whom I stayed with until a few years ago.

The problem being that off-the-shelf products never seemed to do everything a busy cab circuit needed with exorbitant purchase and maintenance costs, missing features, speed issues, issues with support and generally items which just weren’t made for cab offices. A prime example being backups that would run at 3AM on a Sunday morning, just when you don’t want to see a message saying “Backing Up…. Please Wait”! On calling support about these issues, we’d just get fobbed off with broken promises and nothing would be done to help!

Several years previously, we’d had a controller (Adam, who also did a few shifts driving for us) working for us to earn a bit of money whilst he was studying Computer Science at University. Meeting up with him again and discussions led to how poor the software is within the taxi and private hire industry.

He agreed to look into writing a program just for my circuit which was completed and did everything the way a system should. Quick to enter jobs, sensible auto-allocation that ensures minimal dead mileage whilst still ensuring things are fair to drivers and a modern database back-end to ensure reliability and stability.

After this had been running well on my own circuit for a while the decision was taken that other companies could also benefit from this system. So, with a few changes to make the system more suitable for other companies, we started marketing the software out to the industry for very reasonable rates (our entire system including a modern telephone system often works out less than people have been quoted just for the telephone system alone!) along with honest and helpful advice. We’re also proud of the fact that we include everything in with any quote we give including Call Popping, IVR, Text Bookings, Text Back, CallBack, Web Bookings – everything we do we include without charging extra. Likewise, whenever we develop a new feature, we will deploy it out to our existing customers for no additional charges.

We’ve now got sites up and down the country on the software, some using data (PDAs) and some just wanting to stay working on voice but to have a good booking and despatch system to help them along with support from a company who care about their customers and know the industry like no other. Our system really is as our marketing says, “Built by a cab company, for a cab company”!

Hopefully that’s explained who we are and where we came from, should anyone ever have a question then feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to help them. I’ll get Adam to register as well so he can help with any technical questions, issues anyone may have or just to give some general IT advice to anyone in the industry.

Kind Regards,

Bob Evans
CabDespatch

Look forward to your posts Rob, welcome aboard.