When you think about it, what do your transport services really do? Who do they really serve? It’s your passengers. The passenger doesn’t care that a driver is ill, they don’t care that you’re a voluntary service. Really, they just care about getting to their appointment, and they rely on you to deliver no matter how busy you are.
Road XS set out to bridge the gap between the provider, the drivers and the passengers. The software however was built with the passenger in mind from the start. We took the view that the passenger doesn’t care. That all they cared about what getting to their appointment. So really, we didn’t build transport software, we built passenger software.
Passenger software means taking the view that nothing else matters other than the passenger. If you think about it though, that’s what you’re doing. You are serving the passenger day in day out. Without the passenger you would have no need for a transport service. So, the passenger might take the view and not care that you don’t have the resources, are stressed, are working from paper and lost todays run sheet, and really it shouldn’t surprise you if their view is that harsh.
In reality, no passenger is like this (or at least not many). But if you take that view above and truly look at it as ‘the passenger doesn’t care’, then really it changes the game and the way you look at the community transport services you provide. It means you must solve problems, not whinge about them. It means you must be solutions focused, and the thing is, we bet you already are.
We bet, that right now, you have more passengers than you do volunteer drivers. This means you already have solved a problem of higher demand than you have resources available to serve your passengers with. In the ideal world, every passenger would have their own driver. But that just doesn’t happen. It means you are constantly balancing increased demand with limited resources. And this is where the passenger software part comes in useful.
Passenger software allows you to collect passengers wants and needs and package those into a workflow that consistently delivers day in, day out. The faster, better and more reliably you serve your passengers, the better your transport services will be.
Imagine a scenario where you have five journeys booked well in advance and everything is fine. But then, you receive a call that one of your drivers is ill. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose – at least if you’re not using passenger software. If you’re using a paper-based system you suddenly need to find all the journeys that driver was doing, no doubt make further notes on paper, and then then go down your list of drivers and fill the gaps for each journey that driver can’t do today. The problem his, you only have two hours to do it in. Oh, and you better let the passengers know too that there’s a driver change.
It’s more than likely that in this scenario you would cancel the journeys and inform the passenger that you’re very sorry, but you’re not going to be able to take them to their appointment today because the driver is ill.
There’s just one problem with that. The ‘passenger doesn’t care’.
You’re now left with a disgruntled passenger who may or may not use your servives again as they feel you’re suddenly unreliable. Just because you missed one journey. But if you had carefully built passenger software for community transport you could quickly react to any passenger needs and literally the click of a button.
With a passenger software in place, you have all your passenger’s contact details to hand along with all their personal needs. All you would do within Road XS is mark the driver as unavilable, and then each journey which is happening today for that driver, shows up as an urgent task on the action board – meaning this is your first focus of priority. You can quickly find the nearest available driver for each journey or combine passengers into the same driver vehicle who might be going to the same location. You can inform the passengers that there had been a few problems this morning, but not to worry that an alternative driver has been allocated and we will still get you to your appointment on time.
That’s how passenger software saves you time and worry and enables you to deliver no matter the crisis. Passenger software allows your to deliver a personalised service and offers comfort and support to your passengers as they know you have taken that extra step to deliver.
