Be it commuting from home to work or addressing any exigency, the urgency of a taxi can be felt by almost all segments of the society.
Post the Uber disruption, the myth associated with a taxi being unaffordable to the middle-class populace busted and demand for online taxi booking services proliferated, along with the competition in the taxi booking services landscape itself.
With such a drastic rise in the number of taxi-hailing businesses, it becomes crucial to shift gaze towards unique features of taxi booking software for businessmen to be able to achieve a consolidated position in the taxi booking service marketplace. Below is a complete guide for the development of the taxi booking app with distinguished features:
Gain Control Over Prices with Dynamic Fare System
A dynamic fare system can play an integral role in a taxi-hailing business. The uniqueness of the feature can be beneficial to admin, drivers, as well as passengers. Since drivers use heat-maps to determine areas with high demands, in many instances, areas with low demand face the lack of taxis.
However, similar to surge pricing, admin can set fare for a specific area for a particular period of time, thereby attracting the attention of drivers and ensuring that an adequate number of taxis are available to cater to the low demand. In addition, the feature also helps admin to attract a number of drivers in areas with high demand, especially during peak hours.
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Keep Your Service Provider Motivated with Driver Incentives
Generally, a taxi-hailing app is developed by keeping a ‘customer-centric’ approach. A zoomed-in focus on drivers’ app can help reduce the attrition rate of service providers from the business. The driver incentive feature is exactly what will keep drivers glued to your business.
The feature can be set with three parameters – online hours, ride completion, and time-slot criterion. The quest for completing the targeted number of rides will instigate drivers to take more rides and earn better incentives. This, thereby bridging the gap between demand and supply.
Get to Know Your Online Taxi booking Business Better with Reports and Analytics
As data is the new business asset for digital businesses, reports and analytics are propellers to upkeep the vertical trajectory of these businesses. The same is the case with the Uber-like taxi-hailing app business. Every request made in the online app-booking platform gets at least one of the following responses:
- No Driver Available.
- Ride Cancelled.
- Ride Request Rejected.
- The Ride Completed.
Besides these data, insights into the registration of new users frequently traveled routes, positive and negative feedback can also be culled from the report and analytics section.
Offer Payment Convenience to Your Riders with Postpaid Wallet Option
Despite the “at a tap” conveniences of making a payment through different modes in an online taxi booking app, the app can be further made user-friendly by incorporating the “once-a-month” payment option. Similar to the electricity and water bills, riders can choose a date of the month, on which they receive a monthly bill that includes the fare of all rides they have taken during the month.
On a designated day of the month, a push notification regarding the total bill can be sent to riders through the taxi booking app along with the email notification. The feature can also serve as an additional revenue catalyst.
The admin can decide the duration till when the rider can pay the monthly bill, say three days. A failure to do so can allow admin to charge a late fee. The late fee can be a fixed amount or can be a predetermined percent of the monthly bill.
Provide Your Riders with the Freedom to Travel Anywhere, Anytime with the Outstation Feature
Say, for instance, a rider wishes to go to a picnic to an isolated destination outside the city. Availing a taxi within the city limits isn’t a great deal for the rider; finding a taxi on the outskirts can cause a lot of trouble.
That is when the outstation feature comes to action. The feature can help rider book car with a personal driver for a specified number of kilometers and time. This can serve masses, especially during outstation journeys and nighttime travel.
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Ensure Enhanced Rider-Driver Bonding with Driver Instruction Option
Since winning in the taxi booking app translates to catering to the riders in a better manner, businessmen can leverage the driver instruction to take a “rider-centric” approach. Using the driver instruction feature, riders can make special requests and give instructions to drivers for achieving greater convenience.
For instance, a rider can ask for a carrier, in case he is traveling with a lot of luggage or can ask for a wheelchair for a handicapped co-rider. By offering special services and facilities to riders, businessmen will be able to achieve better rider-retention rates and can make a distinguished taxi-hailing app business.
Extend your Hand with 24*7 Support to Offset Internal Challenges
Talking about the ‘call-and-ride’ taxi-hailing model, there is no surefire way to get riders to you in case of issues. What they simply choose to do is churn out to your competitors. In addition, issues such as excessive fares, assaults, and any other wrongdoings can also remain in the dark, and its surfaces, there is no physical evidence.
However, when you offer an online mobile app, you offer safety and security to your riders with the help of features such as an emergency push-button and online support. While even Uber believed it would be better to have an email-based support system, riders demand a shorter wait window to get their critical issues resolved, which can offer you a competitive advantage.
Safeguard your Business from Prying Eyes with a Cloud-based Data Storage System
You are into the business for the long-term. So, why not also extend efforts towards tackling challenges that could inhibit your way to business expansion? Given the increasing influence of stringent data privacy policies, such as GDPR, it becomes crucial to protect the integrity of your riders by having 360-degree protection against cybercriminals and data robbers.
The online taxi-hailing software should be based on cloud technology to provide you with the utmost flexibility and added security to the data generated.
Make Actionable Business Plans with a Data-driven Approach
What sets the Uber-like ride-hailing software from the traditional taxi service is the generation of data in huge quantities. A traditional model can help you gain only phone numbers and names of people. But digital data can also help you track the frequent traveling destinations and routes. Thereby, offering data regarding the hot spots where drivers are most probable to receive ride requests easily.
What’s more is, you can leverage the pinpointing of high demand and low supply by increasing the fare and name it to surge pricing, and riders won’t complain but comply with your model.
Take Complete Control over your Business with 100% Customized Software
While most of the software works with a standardized approach, the fact that your business is unique, though, falling under the same domain. For your regional business, there could be a feature or two that does not resonate with you; having them adds no value to the services you provide.
In such cases, you have a say in what you expect out of all these features. If you choose to launch your app with viable and advanced features together, you have the freedom to do so; if you feel you need to test your business before getting into the advanced version, it is totally your call.
All you have to get is a 100% access to your software along with the enable/disable the feature that helps you take complete charge of your business.
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How to Go About Incorporating the Unique Features in an Online Taxi booking App?
If you are running a taxi-hailing service business or planning to run an Uber-like business, incorporating the aforementioned unique features will help gain an upper hand in the competitive landscape of taxi-hailing business.
The first step, however, lies in determining the exact features that your taxi-hailing service needs on the basis of the targeted demography. Demography will serve as a crucial parameter. It measures the gap between the extent of taxi booking software and the ideal taxi booking app.
The second step is to gauge the feasibility of a feature within the software. Use multiple test cases and assess the need for a feature. The third step is to seek help from an experienced Uber-like app development company.
An experienced app development company can guide your way to the top by offering you with proper consultation services. They will help you analyze the need and bridge the gap between the real demand-supply scenarios. This will drive your business in the right direction.
There are numerous taxi booking app development companies; selecting the one that specifically caters to your personal business model can be a challenging task. However, experience and the success rate of an online Uber-like app development company can help you gauge the performance.
This article is written by Mushahid Khatri. He is a solution consultant at Yelowsoft, one of the leading Taxi app development company in 2017. It is known for developing Taxi Dispatch Software of unmatched quality. He believes in sharing his strong knowledge base with a leaned concentration on entrepreneurship and business.
This article is written by Mushahid Khatri. He is a solution consultant at 
