Taxi Driver Online

:sad: Our firm recently had its old system replaced with Auriga. What I dont understand is why we dont have textback now. My boss says we do but now the customer has to pay for it.. at 15p a go. He says nobody wants it now or they say 'ok as long as you knock it off the fare', which of course we cant afford to do, 30 textbacks a day at 15p equals £4.50 a day out of my pocket, over £22 a week, £88 a month, I can buy a new Octavia for that.
I know of dozens of customers who are unhappy about not getting the texts and are using our competitors who still do it for free.
Customers dont want to pay for it, I have done 1 in 6 weeks, I used to do 30-40 a day and the customers loved it. :cry:

Callback has to be your answer, providing punters are made aware that the call from the office is telling them that the cab is near, and they shouldn't/needn't answer the call.

Textback, IMO, is a great way to pi** off punters. Callback done properly cost nothing.

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IDFIMH

Callback is not the same, as far as I understand, our textback could tell you what type/colour the car was, even give my name out to them. Wouldn't the punter ring back the missed call and block up the callback thingummyjig and stop other callbacks going out.

The office staff tell the customer 'Your phone will ring a couple of times when your car arrives.'

Regulars recognise the number. In fact, I tell them to save it as 'taxi ringback' or similar so they know what the number means next time.

Works brilliantly.

Not if they are briefed properly by the radio operator, and then it need only be done once.

You can set the call back to ring only a couple of times, thus leaving a missed call on the phone with the firms number.

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IDFIMH

Most of our customers pay £20/month for 10,000 texts so according to my sums that works out at 0.2 pence a time. It saves all the time wasting of operators telling people to not answer their phone and gets the people out quicker. It’s better for the company and better for the drivers but if the manager wants to bugger things up by trying to make a few extra pennies then that’s his choice.

Thing is with ringback, it only takes one person to answer without checking who’s calling and the company ends up with a mobile call charge equivalent to over a hundred texts.

Bill

That is similar to what we had in before I think, there was no charge at all to the customer. So who pockets the money, my boss or Auriga? There has been chat with our drivers, saying that if the fares are reduced by 15p to compensate the customer, who are our bread and butter, then we should pay less radio at the end of the week. Another calculation, if I do 40 texts a day x 15p = £6 times 5 = £30, then my boss is going to be well down in his weekly money if 100 drivers do that, roughly £3000 a week.

[b]It would be cheaper for him to employ someone to sit and text the customers all night, I think I might approach him with that one. I will charge £40 a day to text from home, times 7 = £280 . WOW what a saving he will make. must dash to work with my proposal. [/b]Is Auriga the only company that does it this way?

I am not sure where you get the 15p from, I think it is actually 35p that is charged to the customer. Auriga actually own the company who deliver the text message (www.taxitextalert.com) so they hope to pocket a bit of money from YOUR customers but most customers would just assume it is your boss making an extra few pence off them (the word scrooge comes to mind at this time of year). All other software companies (apart I think from Autocab) allow you to purchase your own cheap bundle of texts as Bill at Datamaster explains.

Surely a text generator will do the trick?? Ask your firm if they are having one.

Our Call back rings 4 times if the punter answers it there's nothing there.

The thing is Nige every time someone does answer, the company generally has to pick up the bill and the call charges over a quarter can rack up to several hundreds of pounds even for a small company. Trust me on this one Nige I’ve seen the bills! Text back on the other hand works out miles cheaper at five for a penny and people prefer it to a missed call because it give them the car details.

I think your also getting a bit confused to how text back works. Nobody actually types the texts, the computer does all that. The technology‘s fairly simple and as far as I’m aware, all companies include as standard these days. We supply a little device that you just pop in a "pay as you go" SIMM and that’s it, job done! Works brilliantly for both text bookings and text back.

Routing the texts via a third party is an old fashioned method going back to the days when texts were relatively expensive. The text info is sent to a third party company who has a special rate for sending bulk texts. We considered doing the same ourselves on behalf of all our customers but with all the providers cutting one another’s throats on call charges, we decided to let the market find the best solution.

To my way of thinking, if it puts people off using the service then everyone looses out and problems that 24 hours describes start to appear. Auriga and the other companies that use this method have probably made a fortune from it but now they have a huge dilemma. Can they afford to drop what’s essentially massive cash cow or do they just carry on regardless?

Bill

Mmm doesn't look bad at all, so it's just a normal PAYG Sim card and that does all the work??





Ours doesn't work like that Bill, there's no voice when you pick the phone up it's a dead line, you get idiots phoning the number back saying have you called me? I don't think there's any charge for that.




Who are the main providers of the Text service Bill and what's the normal rate for a firm with lets say 50 cars?

Sorry for all the questions mate Happy New Year.

We use an O2 business sim, it allows over 30,000 texts a month (we have never gone past that figure), it costs only £30 per month. Prior to that we swopped between 1 sim and a couple of others to keep in the 'fair usage' but text bundles are so cheap these days and people like o2 realise the potential. We have a same contract type phone for £30/month that we make all our outgoing calls on, keeps lines free and theres no limit on that either.
Some of our customers use us 4 or 5 times a day, I think they would be very, very unhappy at being charged 35p a go to use our service. What about the poor souls on payg, you would just eat away at thier credit.

No problem with questions Nige just as long as you don’t ask me for money.

The doctors pretty much answered the question re the best current deals on text charges and that’s also what most of our customers currently use. Last year it was a case of keep swapping providers as they all fought each other on prices but O2 now seems to have cornered the market.

On the SIMM thing by the way, it’s actually the computer that does the real work; the SIMM card is just the same as the one in your mobile phone. In fact, you could just connect your mobile phone to our system rather than using one of our modules but a mobile in a taxi office is a bit open to abuse so most opt for the module.

As for the call charges, if you make a ringback call on a normal phone line and the other person answers the call, then you’ll be charged even if nothing is said. It’s not an issue for landlines because most can’t even get to the phone within a couple of rings. With mobiles though, people very often have them in their hand and often will often just answer without even looking and that’s where the big bills come from.

What it would cost you with 50 cars depends how many texts you send. We have an option to send texts only on request, in which case £10 of credit on a pay as you go SIMM would last forever. Set it to text every call and you’d need something like the O2 contract probably 10,000 /£20 per month.

It’s a no brainer at these prices for the benefits it gives but amazingly some still wont use it saying it’s too costly. Total nutters!

Bill

What happens on landlines with text alert?

we use cordic and they charge us around £49 per month subscription and texts at 7p a message, if we dont subscribe they charge us 10p a message i feel both ways are too expensive wouldnt mind paying £20 for 10,000 texts you cant go wrong.

Cordic told me that all their messages are delivered guaranteed when driver presses arrive. but im sure using an o2 sim would be just as good?

by the way we also use ring back and it works a treat customers who want to check the missed call come through to an automated message your taxi has arrived please make your way to the pick up point.