opened the app on his smart phone and set it on the desk in front of me as we sat down. “It knows your location like other apps through GPS, so wherever you are in the city you just have to hit the Book Now button, enter any notes you feel the driver should have, and hit Confirm Your Order.” As he was explaining the step-by-step, Brian was ordering a cab to the dispatch centre in order to show me how quickly the request showed up on their system on his desktop computer. It was instantaneous. He immediately removed the request from the system, but before he did, I noticed on the monitor that there were several drivers ready in Zone One to take a call. This speaks to a taxi service that finished out the final 90 days of 2016 with a 92% service response time, which means 92% of the time there was only a 10 minute wait between phone call and the passenger getting into the vehicle. “We’re a regular small business dealing with the day-to-day challenges posed by delivering highly time sensitive, on demand ground transportation every minute of every day.” “I would love to have the ability to throw back the curtain and show people exactly what happens behind the scenes,” Brian said. “I think if people had an idea of the volumes and understood that the vast majority of trips are text book, it would give them a completely different perspective of the taxi industry. In the end, we’re far from the stereotype portrayed in the movies and on TV, or the heartless and monopolistic “taxi cartel” that is often referred to in media,” he laughed. “We’re a regular small business dealing with the day-to-day challenges posed by delivering highly time sensitive, on demand ground transportation every minute of every day.”
Our rep, Peter Bowers, has really worked to ensure our technology needs are taken care of.”
Peter can be reached at peter.bowers@rci.rogers.com. As we walked down the hallway toward his office, I remembered to ask Brian about the app.
One calling card of the small business that’s around every
“Our booking app is about four years old,” he said as he
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JANUARY 2017
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