Hailing a cab is now easier with one single universal app on your smartphone that hails the cab that’s physically closest to you no matter where you are in any city, any country, or your favorite watering hole at home or elsewhere. You can even flag a nearby cab with such an app on an isolated dirt road in the country where your car just ran out of gas.
It won’t matter which cab company is involved as long as the driver or his company is registered with the app. Clearly, new technology such as this is a godsend for the travelling public who need such transportation in as timely a fashion as humanly possible with a well trained professional driver behind the wheel.
Travelers want such a service for reasons that are obvious and so do most drivers but with taxi brokers—especially large taxi companies in big cities, it is quite another story. They are steadfastly opposed to it and it seems anything else for that matter that would benefit the customer. They are quite content to have unwashed, ill-educated persons driving a run down rust bucket arriving two hours after the customer placed the call. They are afraid that such technology or centralized dispatching as it’s often called will kill competition and put them out of business.
Let’s examine some of the advantages and disadvantages of such dispatching:
1: COMPETITION AND DRIVER CONTROL:
Effective competition is in reality more between drivers than cab companies themselves.
For example: A customer voices concerns to a company about a driver’s unsatisfactory service and decides not to use that company again. She now calls a competing company in the hope of getting better service than the previous company, only to have the same miscreant driver show up at her door. The first company fired the driver over complaints and he merely starts work with the second company. So much for interbroker competition.
Effective driver control is undoubtedly what distinguishes good companies from bad ones but owing to the forgoing reasons, it is no guarantee of customer safety and satisfaction.
A universal app with its filtration system can easily deal with that kind of problem easily. Such apps allow the customer, on completion of the trip to rate the driver, usually on a 5 star system. Five stars means the customer would be glad to have that driver transport her again. That means such a driver would be sent before others are considered if he is close enough. A single star signifies that a drivers as described above would not be sent.
Government regulators employ taxi inspectors who handle any and all comments about service and will investigate complaints, particularly more serious ones, and are considered peace officers. In Calgary and most other cities simply dial 311 to voice your comments on a driver’s performance.
2: SETTING FARES:
Modern taxi apps can now do something else: Calculate the fare and collect the fare in advance as other transportation modes do.
When a customer hails a cab through an app and enters his or her destination, the required fare appears on the screen and the customer then accepts or rejects the service offer prior to dispatching a cab.
Even cash and random street hails can handle such a metering method. What’s important here is you have a happy customer with fewer incidents of taxi fraud.
It’s obvious that such technology has completely upended public transportation, particularly the taxi/limousine industry in general. And unless the taxi industry gets into the 21st century, it will undoubtedly go the way of the dinosaur.
ProCabby is the only company that has the technology to offer the sort of services described above. Customers don’t want their smartphone screens cluttered with numerous apps offering identical services.
The taxi industry will make a lot more money when they put the customer’s interests first and led the driver earn a respectable living.
ProCabby’s technology will achieve exactly that!