Your customers will stop ringing.
The demand will belong to whoever has the app, and it can be yours.
Whose customer it is, who decides, and the phone
The customer belongs to whoever serves them
In the app they belong to nobody until somebody takes the job. When one of your drivers accepts, that customer goes into your records with their history. If they were already yours, they carry on from where they were.
Nobody answers the phone
The request reaches the driver directly, without passing a desk. You take your commission on a job that cost you no office time at all.
The phone stays
People who ring carry on ringing, and their job lands in the same place. The app is one more channel, not a change of system.
The phone number is a habit that is running out.
And an operation without an app does not inherit those customers: it loses them.
The customers who have rung you for twenty years will carry on ringing. The ones who are thirty today have never rung for a taxi in their lives: they open an app, and if yours is not on their phone they open somebody else’s.
This is not a forecast, it is what has already happened in every town where an application arrived before the operators did. The service was the same and the cars were the same: all that changed was who was holding the request.
And your commission accrues anyway. A driver is only on the platform because they belong to an operator: even on the job nobody allocated, nobody answered the phone for, and that landed straight on their handset, the share that is yours stays yours.
What actually changes
They choose, from the professionals’ offers.
And each price was set by whoever is driving.
They enter pick-up and destination and see the offers for that route, ordered by how close each driver is. They filter, they compare, and they take the one they want: in a hurry, look at the minutes; watching the money, look at the price.
The difference from the apps you know is not that there is no choosing here: it is who sets the price and who is in the list. There the platform decides and allocates. Here every offer belongs to a professional affiliated to a real operator, at a rate they set themselves, and nobody adjusts it between the request and the acceptance.
An operation that wants one price across the board can ask its drivers to adopt the operator’s tariff. It stays their decision, and it shows in the list.
And when the job is done
If one of your drivers accepted, that customer goes into your records. Next time they recognise you and you recognise them: their terms, their addresses, their habits.
That is why the app is not only about keeping the customers you have: it is about picking up new ones, who belonged to nobody before. But it only happens if your drivers are there and their offers hold up against the rest.
How customers, offers and history are handled is on the Customers page.
Customers can book ahead.
And those are not taken by whoever is passing: you allocate them.
The customer sets the date, the time, the route and how many people, and sees the offers from the operators who can cover it: name, price and type of vehicle. They choose, and the request lands there. With a notification, in the queue, ready to go to whichever driver you want.
If they choose you, that customer becomes yours even if they were not before. And if they were already yours they find you by name, without having to fish you out from among the others.
It is the one moment you come back into the middle, and that is deliberate. A job for six tomorrow morning cannot depend on who happens to be awake at the time: somebody has to take responsibility for it the night before. That is exactly the work an operator exists to do, and it is what an app of immediate jobs only cannot do.
The half six flight, the hospital transfer, the business customer with a morning meeting in London: these are the jobs worth the most, and nobody leaves them to chance.
And it is the one place where your tariff works on its own. Until here it served to correct your drivers’ rates: here it is the price you turn up with, next to the other operators’.
Now that customer is yours. And you know them.
Their habits, the journeys they repeat, what they always book.
Every job leaves a trace in your records: where they go, at what time, how often, in what vehicle. After a few weeks you do not have a name on a list, you have a person whose working week you understand.
From dispatch you prepare offers that fit and send them out. Ten Tuesdays at a fixed price for the one who is always at the airport at the same hour. Terms kept for the company that sends you people every week. A proposal for the regular who has not booked for two months.
It is the move from answering to proposing: you stop waiting for the request and start building it. Something an application that sends you jobs will never let you do, because that data is its product.
Customers on loan are not customers.
On a platform that is not yours you bring them, you serve them and you leave them there. Here the records are yours: the names, the history, the habits and the terms you agreed. Nobody gets between you and them, and nobody sells you back the requests from your own town.