Yelowsoft is a leading taxi dispatch and management company whose main aim is to solve complex taxi business problems with their cutting-edge solutions. Recently we came up with a feature in our solution called ́hours tracking’.
Before moving further, let’s understand what hours tracking is?
What is hours tracking?
Yelowsoft is proud to be the first company to introduce the hours tracking feature in the taxi dispatch system. As the name suggests, it will track and show the no.of online hours of all your drivers. Not only this, it will also show the number of online hours of each driver for any given day.
Why is it required?
Many taxi enterprises heavily rely on reports and analytics to identify their strengths and shortcomings. These reports and analytics provide critical data such as total no. of ride requests, online drivers, total tax, driver earning, commissions, and many more.
However, reports and analytics don't show you the full picture. It does show you the total no. of online drivers, but it doesn’t show you for how long your drivers were online.
This was the reason why many companies were unable to find out how productive and efficient their drivers were. Less number of online hours was the root cause of many problems that the companies faced, but they didn’t have any mechanism to determine it.
One way to find out the total number of online hours would be to continuously monitor the dashboard for 24x7 and manually count the no. of online hours for each driver. Obviously this methodology is not practical.
Keeping all these factors in mind we came up with hours tracking feature that can show you a more comprehensive analysis of your business performance along with helping you to identify the shortcomings of your business.
The hours tracking feature has a plethora of benefits. WIth this feature, the taxi booking owners can take several key decisions to improve their overall business. Let’s understand these various benefits of hours tracking one by one.
Bifurcation of online hours into idle & trip hours
Many of our taxi business clients were facing a peculiar problem. They found out that they were not making enough profits due to the low number of completed rides. However, the number of online drivers showed a different story. The total profit didn’t match with the number of drivers who were online.
One of the possibilities for this mismatch was that not all online drivers were getting enough ride requests. Many of them might be just sitting idle as they didn’t get any rides. However, there was no way to confirm this theory.
To solve this issue the hours tracking feature bifurcated the online hours of all the drivers into trip hours and idle hours.
This bifurcation gave a way better clarity as to why the number of trips were fewer. This feature confirmed the theory that even though many of their drivers were online, they didn’t receive that many ride requests thus rendering them idle.
This feature was significant as now admins knew what the real problem was. It made them realize that their drivers were not the problem. The actual issue was of the low passenger requests.
Plan incentives to gain optimal results
We all know that incentives are an effective way to motivate your drivers to work more. But, how about designing an optimal incentive structure that can solve your core issues along with motivating drivers? Our hours tracking feature can do exactly that.
Let’s take an example to understand this better. Suppose you have 100 drivers. 80 of those drivers stay online from 10 AM to 4 PM. However, from 6 PM to 8 PM, there’s a significant drop in the number of online drivers. Only 20 drivers are online from 6 PM to 8 PM.
Moreover, the window of 6-8 is of peak hours which means at this time you receive the most numbers of ride requests. If only 20% of the drivers are online during peak hours, then surely you’re going to miss on so many booking opportunities.
But, the reports and analytics would show a different picture in which all your drivers are online throughout the day.
To overcome this issue and to maximize your profits, you need maximum drivers during 6 PM to 8 PM. This is where incentives plans come in the picture. You can make new incentive structure in such a way that it motivates and attracts drivers to be online during the peak hours.
You can make an incentive plan which offers some extra amount to all those drivers who stay online for those two hours.
The combination of online hour feature and incentives is vital as the former is effective in identifying the core issue of your taxi business and the latter can be used as a course of action to overcome it.
Read More: Encourage your drivers by providing exciting incentives
Monitor drivers on hourly basis
To run a taxi business efficiently, one needs to understand its dynamics well. An admin needs to understand that getting the reports of total number of hours, trips, and online driver doesn’t provide the full picture.
Let’s consider a scenario, suppose you have 100 drivers in your fleet. Out of those 100 drivers only 25 drivers were online for more than 8 hours. The rest of them were online for less than 8 hours which also included few drivers which were online for only an hour or two.
At the end of the day, your report will show the number of online drivers as 100, which is true; however, it doesn’t highlight the fact that 75% of those drivers didn’t even complete 8 hours.
With the hours tracking feature in place, you can monitor all your drivers on an hourly basis. With this feature you can easily find out the number of hours completed by the rest of 75% of drivers. Moreover, you can also keep an eye on those drivers who were online only for an hour or two.
Many drivers work on shift basis. They have to complete a specific number of hours of their shift. However, earlier there was no way to find out if the driver actually completed those hours or not. Many of the drivers just completed just 50% of their duration and got paid for the full day. With this feature, you can track driver’s hours tracking and ensure that they complete their working hours.
Apart from this, the hours tracking feature can also help in determining if a driver is eligible to get an incentive or not. In simple words, it helps the admin to know if the driver has actually completed the required number of hours to get an incentive.
Take insight-driven business decisions
As mentioned earlier, the hours tracking feature provides many intricate details apart from the total number of online hours. The no. of idle hours and trip hours are few of those details.
The ratio of idle hours and trip hours is a crucial indicator as to how you’re performing. Let’s consider two scenarios to understand this well.
Scenario 1: Idle hours > Trip hours
Let’s assume that you have 10 drivers and their cumulative online hours are 100 hours.
Out of which 80 hours are idle hours and 20 hours are trip hours. It means that for every one trip hour, your drivers are spending 4 hours just sitting idle. This huge gap between the idle hours and trip hours means that your drivers are not getting enough ride requests. This data suggests that you have to focus more on the customer request side rather than the driver side.
Scenario 2: Trip hours > Idle hours
In this scenario, the total number of trip hours is greater than the idle hours. We’ll consider the same example where the total drivers are 10 and the total number of hours tracking is 100.
In this the total number of trip hours is 95 and the total number of idle hours is 5. Any admin would be happy to see these stats as it shows 95% productivity.
However, there’s also another side to this story. The low number of idle hours might also indicate that your taxi company is understaffed. In simple words, the number of drivers you have are way less than the amount of requests being sent by the passengers, due to which you’re losing on a number of booking opportunities.
With this valuable insight you can recruit more drivers into your company and see if the total number of bookings goes up or not.
The ideal scenario for your taxi company would be if the total number of idle hours is between 10-15% and the total number of trip hours is 85-90%.
Notify your drivers with hours tracking feature
The feature of hours tracking is also useful for the drivers. The hours tracking feature acts as an indicator that the application is working. Many times, it happens that the driver doesn’t receive any request for as long as an hour. During this time, the driver feels that the application is not working due to network or any other technical issue, which is not true.
Now with the hours tracking feature, the driver can see the number of online hours on the application. These online hours also indicate that the application is working all fine. If the driver faces any network or other technical issue then the hours tracking clock will just stop. With this feature, it gets easier for drivers to determine whether their application is working or not.
Read More: Advanced features of Yelowsoft's ride hailing app.
Secondly, the hours tracking feature also acts as a motivating factor. When drivers see their number of online hours completed, they feel satisfied. Earlier, drivers got to know about their completed online hours after a day. There was no way to find out the number of online hours in real-time. This caused a lot of confusion and uncertainty among the drivers. Many times, drivers missed their incentive targets for the matter of just a few minutes as they were unaware of their total online hours.
With this feature in place, they can view their online hours at any instant of time. Moreover, it also motivates them to stay online for longer times as they can see their progression in real-time.
Moreover, as this feature establishes transparency between the drivers and the admin as both the parties can view the online hours in real-time. It also eliminates all the possibilities of any manipulation as far as the total no. of online hours is concerned.
This was all about the online hour feature, to know more about the Yelowsoft’s upcoming updates, keep reading this space.
