Taxi Driver Online

I do wonder if all the fault is on the councils' side. We had a fabulous relationship with our council until a couple of drivers started to get militant. Now, everything's a fight.

I have always found that if your right with them they'll normally treat you the same way, suppose it comes down to mutual respect. Some operators get their knickers in a twist and take it out on the LO, next thing you know that operator's getting weekly visits from his LO.....and it ain't for a coffee!

My GM and myself finally finished editing our databases today, it's taken approximately 75 man hours to complete but that's that job done with now. Our out of town zones were also drawn manually onto a map ready to be loaded onto our system by Auriga, we should get all of our zones loaded onto the system by the middle of next week. It's been a long time since i had previously had to do these task and I'm not at all sorry to see the back of them, it's very boring stuff.

So what's next?......Well first I'm just going to chill out this weekend and try to forget about work for a couple of day's. I went to bed last night and just couldn't clear my mind and go to sleep, it's an exiting time were going through at the moment and my business has taken up all of my time. Don't get me wrong i really don't mind, i don't mind at all, it's just that after taking it easy over the last couple of years you kinda get out of the habit of working hard.

When will i learn to keep my big mouth shut!

I'm in the office again this evening as one of my tele op's has just rung in sick........So much for having a chill out weekend!

I really need to get some more staff trained up to work in our control room/call centre after we go live with Auriga's Evo. We have been one person short for the last couple of months so if the switch over goes well I'll be advertising for a new tele op at the beginning of April. It normally takes us about 4-6 weeks to train a new tele op using our existing system, I'm hoping to cut this down to 2-3 weeks when we switch systems as Evo is windows based so it should be easier to train people on.

Good luck then and if they are any good keep hold of them, coz and I'm sure I don't need to tell you dodgy ones can ruin your business! I hope some of ours are reading this!

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Life? Don't talk to me about life!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjm2eslm6hI

I dont think ours will be reading it....they'd fall at the hurdle of reading

CC

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Yeah so are ours but it was worth a rant been one of those days

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Life? Don't talk to me about life!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjm2eslm6hI

Oh is you having a hard day, bless

I think our lot come to work to sleep cos they certainly don't answer the phones

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Note to self: Just because it pops into my head does NOT mean it should come out of my mouth!!

I saw the day coming and took the afternoon off to watch the rugby down the club. They're probably having a crackin' evening out there!!

I have visited many other PH company's over the years, at one time or another almost all of these have encountered similar problems, including mine!

There are several way's that operators/managers can help to cure this problem, they include staff incentives, call logging software linked to your phone system and individual performance software linked to your booking system.

We found our own cure almost by accident, we put a new phone system in a couple of years ago, i had a couple of monitors put up around our office displaying the total incoming calls for that day and also the total amount of missed/abandoned calls. The monitor i put in our call centre/control room was inadvertently put in a place so that the drivers could also see the monitor from outside the office. When a tele op or a controller went outside for a break the drivers would sit watching the missed call display going up, and then hurry them back to work......brilliant

This alone reduced our missed call rates from 10-15% pre install down to below 8% on most shifts, my target is to get this down to below 5% although this is proving very difficult to achieve.

Our company has the things bar the display for the drivers to see. The reason I mentioned them falling asleep is because they are bored because the phones aren't ringing

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Note to self: Just because it pops into my head does NOT mean it should come out of my mouth!!

Which phone system/software provided your call monitoring?

How did you incentivise your staff?

Our staff are divided into controllers and telephonists. I've been trying to work out how to offer fair incentives for the last ten years.

In a previous life, I was used to working on commission based on various measures so I appreciate the value of the right incentive but I'm struggling to resolve this particular conundrum.

I think it's called wages, and if they don't have a job they don't get them.

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IDFIMH

Then they will do just enough to get their wages. An incentive system will encourage greater effort to achieve greater rewards, in much the same way that you will try to perform at your peak in order to achieve your greater incentive: Tips!

Making customers ring you instead of your competitors can be very tricky, your operator needs to be inventive and try something different that gets the customers attention. I've tried to learn by looking at different trade organisations that are also trading in very competitive markets, i have often had great success by doing this, even whist others might be encountering a down turn in trade.

It may sound obvious but operators also need to concentrate on increasing their market share, new taxi users are much more difficult to find and then attract. By increasing your market share this also puts your competition to the test, more than 25 taxi company's have ceased trading since we started up, it's a sad statistic but that's business.