Taxi Driver Online

Again from my experience most customers will use the same firm they have always used, unless something really bad happens.

Large corporate customers do shop around, but the old dears, shoppers, station work etc seldom change firms.

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IDFIMH

Quote:

Again from my experience most customers will use the same firm they have always used, unless something really bad happens.

Yes Sussex, I agree... but... In the past customers used Delta to carry them into town but when it came to coming back home they'd typically use a city hack. That was just parr for the course, you queued at the rank or got lucky with a wave or a whistle. That's definitely changing. More and more customers are going both in AND out in a Delta. Why?

For starters, people are more security conscious. Queues of drunken people at the front of empty ranks are notorious for fighting. Waiting inside the premises for a RING ON APPROACH to indicate your car is outside is an attractive alternative. Some use Delta just because they are cheaper. Some don't want to pay more if they're caught in traffic. Some say the service is quicker, some just like to know they can ring up the next day and ask for their lost mobile phone to be traced and returned.

Yes, customers do tend to stick to the same firm for certain runs but there always used to be exceptions where it just made more sense to step into a cab. That's definitely changing in our area. Every day customers come out of the Bootle Strand (the heart of Sefton's cab trade), walk straight passed a queue of empty Cabs, and use their mobile phone to call a Delta which usually takes about two minutes.

Bootle is Delta's busiest area. Its second busiest area is Liverpool city centre, which happens to be home to the largest Hackney Fleet in England and Wales outside of London. Curious eh?

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Don't knock it, 'til you try it....

Sussex wrote:


We used to carry on taking bookings when we were overloaded many years ago but found it to be counter-productive. The theory was fine, take a whole load of jobs when you're busy so there's work left in the system for when you're quiet. In practise, we found customers promising faithfully to wait as long as it takes so you take the booking off them. They immediately seek alternative transport, safe in the knowledge that if all else fails they at least have a booking with the first private hire firm as their fall-back plan. They don't always get round to cancelling that one if they get another lift in the meantime though! So drivers are then on more bogeys, and they get annoyed and go home, and the problem is compounded even more. If you don't bite off more than you can chew, customers get used to the fact. Our customers now know that so long as we are prepared to take a booking off them, we probably won't be long, so they tend to hang on for us.

Sussex wrote:


A quarter? Wow! That just goes to show what happens when private hire firms cherry pick. If a customer gets preferential treatment depending on the destination they give over the phone, pretty soon they wise up to that fact and start telling porky pies, that's human nature, they want to get home as fast as possible. Our destinations are almost always correct because there is nothing to be gained from lying. If we are fully booked, we knock them back. If they say 'But it's a £20 fare' we say 'it doesn't matter if it's £100 fare, we're booked up!' Wherever you are going, if you are still stuck in 20 minutes, try us again then and we'll see how we are fixed.

I appreciate smaller firms don't want to take 'out of area' jobs that aren't heading back in but that's less of an issue the bigger you get.

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Don't knock it, 'til you try it....

Defo got the t-shirt for that one.

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IDFIMH