Tools and technology · For operators · 8 min

What to ask a dispatch supplier before you sign

Eight questions for any supplier. The most important is the one almost nobody thinks to ask.

A dispatch system gets changed every eight or ten years, and the real cost of changing is not the subscription: it is the migration, retraining the controllers, and the weeks when the work goes worse. It is worth asking the awkward questions beforehand, while you still have some bargaining power.

These questions hold for any supplier, us included. If an answer is vague, that is not commercial coyness: it is that there is no answer.

1. Whose customer data is it

Customer records, job history, regular addresses, agreed terms: they are the operator’s asset, not the software’s. Ask who owns them under the contract, and do not stop at the answer in principle.

2. How you take it with you the day you leave

This is the test of the previous question. Is there a complete export, in a readable format, that you can download yourself without asking permission? How long does it take? Does it cost anything? A supplier who answers “we will sort that out for you” is saying no.

3. What it really costs, over a year

The subscription, and whether it grows with drivers, with seats or with jobs
The one-off set-up and the data migration
The modules that were in the demo and are extra in the contract
Updates: included, or charged per version
Training the controllers, and training the new ones in two years’ time
What it costs to add a driver in peak season and take them off in September

4. Who answers at three in the morning

An operator’s work does not keep office hours. Ask for the real support hours, who answers out of hours, and what happens if the system stops on a Saturday night: which phone rings, and whose.

5. What happens if the connection drops

A dispatch system is critical. Ask how you keep working through a failure, whether there is a fallback mode, and where the data sits if the supplier goes under.

6. What your drivers have to do

The most complete system in the world is no use if your drivers will not use it. Ask to see their app, not just your screen: how many taps to accept a job, what they see before accepting, what happens when the phone is old.

7. What else the system talks to

Taximeters, payment systems, accounts, hotel and company portals. Ask what is already integrated, what is “on the roadmap”, and what it costs to integrate something that is not there today.

8. The question almost nobody asks

Who else owns the supplier, and who else they sell to. A dispatch system is the infrastructure that decides which jobs your drivers see: if the owner has interests on the other side of the market too, that position is worth far more than the subscription they charge you.

Here this has already happened. The dispatch system thousands of independent operators ran on was bought by a company that competes with those same operators. It is not a hypothesis and it is not somewhere else.

How to run the meeting

01Send the questions in writing before the demo: answers given out loud get forgotten, written ones stay.
02Have the system shown to you with your own data, not the made-up data in the presentation.
03Ask for the contact of an operator who has used it for more than two years, and ring them.
04Read the termination terms before the set-up terms.