FEBRUARY 2015

NEWSLETTER No. 2

Well I cant believe it is time for the second newsletter this year, with the months flying by and Easter just round the corner. February is traditionally by far the worst time of the year for the Taxi trade, but ACs are bucking the trend with the job count for this February not just beating the pervious two years but smashing it by a country mile!! This February has been an exceptional month, smashing the last two years by nearly 12,000 jobs (Yes Twelve thousand)!!, Our Automatic call answering facility being on target to have handled more calls than the last two months since its launch, just short of 10 thousand jobs. With this figure increasing daily and with great feedback from customers who are now having zero waiting time and instant bookings . Our App was launched in February and whilst we are off to a good start this will need every subscriber and Driver pushing this facility, please card every customer and encourage them to use the APP, we have cards available in the office as well as head rest covers, please call in and collect yours. Our APP will revolutionise the way our customers can book and track a Taxi but for us to take full advantage of this facility we must push it to all our customers, I promise if we all participate results will follow.

John Watson

When you phone the call centre using your mobile, the phone

system recognises that it is a driver calling and redirects your

call to the controller and not to a telephonist . This has been

done to keep our operators free to answer customer calls only. A

vast majority of your calls require the assistance of the controller

this is why it has been done . If for some reason your call cannot

be attended to straight away, (the controller may be dealing with

another driver by message or radio)! you will be placed in a

queue. The queuing system is only operational on the driver

dedicated phone line and NOT the normal phone lines, hope this

has cleared up any misunderstanding. Do you like it , don’t you

like it let us have your views .

DRIVERS DEDICATED PHONE LINE.

AC APP

The APP since its launch date has got of to a steady start and is being used more each week, please try and promote your APP at every opportunity possible.

IVR The calls taken by IVR (Auto answer service) has risen again this month and is now at 12%. This is 4% up on last month.

NIGHT CLUB

IT IS NEW AND ANOTHER FIRST FOR AC TAXIS ACs are pleased to announce that we have joined forces with Chameleon night club and are now in a position to launch a new night club promotion. You will be able to offer customers travelling in your Taxi to the club, a

voucher that will allow ENTRANCE TO THE CLUB FOR JUST £1 AND QUEUE JUMP. A space is provided for you

to put your id number (badge number) or call sign on the voucher and for every voucher the club gets you will receive £1 per voucher payable by the 14

th day of the next month by

us. Just call into the office to collect your vouchers or to find out more about this and other offers available . Please support this campaign and in doing so

will promote ACs as the only Taxi firm to use

when out and about in Southend

ADVERTISING

PHASE 1 Soon you will see a Life Space advert on 10 of our Taxis. Life Space are the first Southend based company to take up our new dynamic marketing program in the rear window of Taxis. Those of you that have taken up the offer to advertise or if you would like to take up the offer, you will be rewarded by cheaper radio rent. PHASE 2 During March will see us gearing up to launch another advertising program . For those that participate will see their radio rents tumble down to as little as £75 per week !!!!!!

QUESTION AND ANSWERS

We are collecting your questions and we will

start printing them soon with the answers. Your

question could be any thing to do with Cordic

(how does it work, why does it do that). The

phone system, or just an answer to a

question .we will start printing all the Q & A in the

next newsletter and each month form then on,

so we should eventually have the answer to any

question you may wish to ask.

NEWSLETTER Remember this is your newsletter if you

would like to see any regular reports such as

the new Taxi bill that is making its way

through parliament or anything else we will try

and make it happen. We are open to

suggestions.

CORDIC AND AC TAXIS

The automation booking service that the new Cordic system allows has enabled us already to corner the market in this field. This has left all of our competitors playing catch up or not having the means to compete in this very rewarding Hi-Tec world . AC Taxis still the biggest, still the best and now market leaders and trend setters in the passenger transport industry. WELL DONE TO YOU ALL

NEWS-FLASH

February job count is 79917

Up by 11836 on last year

IVR 9338, APP 170

CALL THE

MIDWIFE

Do you watch Call The

Midwife on the T.V. Well if you

do, have a look out for the AC

staff member in episode 8. Yes

we employ television stars as

well !

PLACE IN THE SUN

Fancy a holiday in Florida USA. ! then read on.

We have details of a 3 bedroom,3 bathroom condo that sleeps up to 8

people. 10 – 15 mins from Disney parks in Orlando, Florida. It is within a short walk to

shops, restaurants and bars. For more information please email Paul (AC owner/

driver ) on isisso@aol.com photos of Condo below.

SUDOKU

THE BLUE This is an obvious place to start with the extension to the Airport runway and the alterations to Eastwoodberry Lane. It has been suggested by the Forum that the Blue should be put into 2 parts , Blue West and Blue East. With the cut-off point being at St Lawrence Park and the road between Eastwoodberry roundabout and the new Airport/RBS roundabout. Blue East will support Blue West, Blue West will support Blue east. This should stop cars crossing over, therefore allow you to be offered a job that is more suited to you. This will be for a trial period of 4 weeks and de-pending on the feedback as to whether it becomes policy. We would like to carry out a survey to find out if you would like to trial run this idea for 4 weeks. ——————————————————————————————————————————— SURVEY I WOULD LIKE TO TRIAL RUN THE SUGESTION.

YES NO

CALL SIGN ---------------------------------------

PLEASE CIRCLE YOUR PERFERED ANSWER. ONLY ONE VOTE PER CALL SIGN . IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER YOUR VOTE IT WILL BE COUNTED AS A YES I WOULD LIKE TO TRIAL THE SUGESTION IF YOU WISH TO POP IN AND HAVE A LOOK AT THE MAP TO BE CLEAR OF THE SUGESTION PLEASE DO. YOUR VOTE MUST BE IN THE CALL CENTRE BY 17:00hrs on the 14

th March 2015 TO

COUNT. Your vote is important, your opinions and ideas do count so please find time to place your VOTE.

As you may already know we have a owner/driver forum. The forum has been set up to help fine

tune the way work is dispatched. One of the first jobs on the agenda is looking how the town has

geographically changed over the years ,new roads, new hotels and new places of entertainment

which in turn can have a knock on effect to your working day. By looking at the changes to the

town , to see if by fine tuning it may be possible to improve your profit. This can be achieved by

making changes to reduce dead mileage, this in turn will reduce wear and tear of your Taxi, stop

you being bombarded with jobs that you will not take and may be missing the ones you would

take, allowing you to reach your jobs quicker therefore complete jobs quicker and be available for

your next job sooner. Its just a case of making every mile count and creating better profitability.

Forum