Taxi Driver Online

Am I missing something here?

Most taxi/PH operators usually run 24 hours a day every day of the year.

A large of amount of their work is done between the hours of 17.00pm Friday night and early Monday morning.

A significant amount of cash is earnt by drivers between those times.

Yet it appears that the data systems suppliers think it's ok to have no maintainance cover between those hours.

They should, but doubt will, hang their heads in shame.

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IDFIMH

sorry that was a joke, but if someone works 9 to 5 and is on standby 24/7 they don't have a life, you work to live not live to work. you do have cover over the weekend it called the helpdesk. if you want engineer you have to pay for it, but most engineer choose not to work weekends. you can always hire you own engineer and get you data company to train them, and as always its ££££££.

They should, but doubt will, hang their heads in shame.

come on you are joking right.

When you are dealing with 100s of drivers wages, then having no work isn't a joke.

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IDFIMH

As a CUSTOMER, I would expect full support from my supplier including 24/7 call out, as my customers do.

Are you seriously suggesting that a team of engineers cannot be rostered to cover weekends? One on the phones, a second on call for site visits?

I haven't yet been involved in contractual negotiations for data equipment but, if and when I am, that will be very close to the top of my shopping list. So, if you want the business, you better get organised!!!

/rant over.

We use mercury and have 24/7 cover.
I have called the engineer a couple of times over a weekend and the engineer remotely logs on to our system and so far has been able to sort out any problems I have had.

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stressed controller!!!

Right as the only supplier that seems to use the forum these days here’s my input on this issue which is probably applicable to most others.

Firstly any company that involves itself in the taxi trade has to be prepared to offer support 24/7. I can’t speak for others, but we certainly take this very seriously and the suggestion that we just don’t care is a million miles away from the truth.

Like others, we provide a 24/7/365 service but what we don’t have is someone sitting round all night and weekends waiting for a call. We run office hours (normally 8am to 6pm) but outside these times we have three emergency mobile numbers and we make it very clear to our customers that these are for emergencies only and most respect this. We have one standard of support contract and everyone gets the same service. Even those that choose not to pay still get help but no upgrades or visits and they don’t get the out of hours numbers.

Most issues are resolvable over the phone if not it may necessitate us coming on line. In very rare cases when all else fails, if it means driving out at three in the morning we do it. Fortunately that sort of thing doesn’t happen too often. I’m not sure what happened with the Auriga system here but if a key had stuck on a keyboard that was causing the system to stop then we’d say exactly the same and to just nip out to the nearest PC store and get a new one. We certainly wouldn’t drive half way across the country for something like that it’s just not practical.

As regards hardware failure, we carry out annual site visits to carry out preventenace maintenance and recommend a rotation of PCs to ensure the dispatcher / server is always the newest machine. As a result, we don’t get many failures, in fact, I’m pretty sure that in the last ten years we’ve not had a company down for much more than an hour (if that).

Sorry if this looks like I’m blowing the company trumpet but this is the reality of the matter albeit not often the drivers view of things.

Bill

I don't think anyone would expect a data firm to drive miles at the weekend to replace a keyboard. If a help desk diagnosed that as a fault then any radio firm would simply change it over rather than wait.

But the issue at hand was that no-one from Auriga was prepared to come to the office to find and sort the problem because it was the weekend.

Now that's simply not good enough and anyone considering changing to Auriga needs to bear that in mind.

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IDFIMH

Apps switch? Haven’t a clue what that is, just hope we don’t have one otherwise we’d be beggared.

Believe it or not, I’ve never seen any other company’s contracts to see what they offer or how much they charge. I suspect Auriga maintenance contracts aren’t cheap hence you don’t expect this sort of treatment. But saying that, I suspect that if they didn’t work this way, then the cost of providing support would sky rocket for everyone right across the board.

We work in pretty much the same way but as a smaller company, it’s not a case of volunteers to cover events such as this, we all know our livelihoods absolutely depends on keeping the customer happy and so one of us will have to draw the short straw. If I had to employ another engineer to cover such events I’d need to triple our current support charges and people just wouldn’t be prepared to swallow that sort of increase.

Bill