As 2023 is almost upon us, we thought it was time to look back on 2022 and all the changes and improvements which have happened on the platform which are benefiting transport providers throughout the country. You can see a long list of all of our updates at updates.roadxs.com but here are some of the big updates from 2022.
Interactive Calendars, Activity Boards and Availability
This feature was a frequent request, and in 2022 we delivered.
It took a lot of work, effort and rebuilding of core functions to get this implemented, but now, you have interactive calendars built into Road XS. This means at a glance you can check how busy your days are from a daily, weekly and monthly perspective. You can also use the same modern calendar design to set driver availability too – along with their existing driver schedules.
This update provides the unique “helicopter view” to remove stress and to make everyone’s life so much easier. It brings so much clarity to anyone’s transport service in the most user-friendly design.
Community Connect
From the outset, Road XS has used service areas to enable you to scale up or scale back your transport services. In 2022, we took this further.
With our community connect service, you can now invite other members of your community into the platform and enable them to create journeys for you. This is particularly useful for hospitals and GP surgeries (and for patient transport services) and means that patients and passengers can book in follow-up transport whilst at their appointments all within a safe and secure bubble. Or, perhaps you wish to remain independent but work together locally with other providers – our community connect service enables you to keep everything together, yet keeps you individual too.
Dead Mileage
Road XS is all about providing you with the options to find the nearest available drivers and removing time-consuming administrative work. The one thing we were missing, was showing “dead mileage” on trips (the part of the journey where the driver is not in the vehicle).
This is now all handled for you via simple settings and is calculated within our auto-invoicing functionality. This means no more manual calculations are needed and complete transparency for all.
Return Pickup Time Clarification
When it came to return journeys, we didn’t always make it obvious for car schemes when the return pickup time was during journey creation. Whilst creating journeys you can now see this clearly. This means passengers and admin teams are kept fully in the loop and it helps when communicating with passengers to ensure the information entered is correct.
Driver Release
As passenger demand continues to soar for community transport, and volunteer drivers are harder to come by, we improved our algorithms to optimise our routes further enabling drivers at locations to take part in more journeys.
This has enabled a higher throughput, with less effort for community transport service providers. It has increased capacity for some up to 30% even with fewer drivers available.
What3Words
In previous versions of Road XS, to pinpoint passengers, drivers and favourite locations you used to have to drag and drop the map pins. Not anymore!
Now you can simply enter the What3Words address and the map is pinned. This is incredibly useful for large locations such as hospitals that have multiple entrances, new housing developments and just finding locations right out in the countryside. Of course, if you provide deliveries, this means you can pinpoint drop-off locations too.
Not only does this improve mileage accuracy but it also enhances passenger and driver safety too – especially if drivers elect to use GPS tracking from the driver portal. It means if there is an accident or issue on a trip you have the last known location to hand to assist the emergency services.
Coming Soon: Apps
One of the core features of Road XS is the user-friendly driver portal. This year, we’ve taken this further and have been working on and have been developing a driver app, complete with GPS tracking and availability.
We are currently going through the approval process and testing and hope this one will be finally released in early 2023. No longer will drivers need to go in via the web app – but will be able to download an app from the Apple and Google Play Store. Of course, this also paves the way soon for an admin and passenger app too. Watch this space!
It’s a Wrap
We hope you all have a lovely Christmas and New Year!
If you want to learn more about what’s possible next year with Road XS then let us know and we can show you everything that it can do to bring your services together, keep you compliant and provide the technology you need to succeed in 2023:
