07 Jul Our Advisory Board: You Help Drive Our Future
One of the ways zoom.taxi stays in touch with the needs of the industry is through its proactive approach towards communications with all of our key stakeholders.
Our Advisory board, consisting of a private hire company owner, a manager, a driver and a customer., is how we can get feedback from you the people on the ground and we can pass on to you information from the markets such as new regulations or customer requirements. It ensures you are involved in our development and growth process so we can deliver the products to help your business thrive.
We’ve chosen these people to ensure we get input and ideas: we have the company owner who keeps us informed on the major issues in running a private hire business and we can adapt and develop our product to meet these new requirements. For example, the TfL regulations in London mean that all operators have to supply specific information to their passenger before the journey starts. Zoom.taxi delivers that and we can make sure all our clients are compliant.
We also speak to a company manager, the person on the front line who gives us ideas about how the product is working and any new features we should develop for our dispatch system. They might give us insights into how we can better automate to save time and effort. And alongside the company manager is the driver, who is the person on the front line for whom the product has to help. If there are things we can do to help drivers, then it will help the whole industry so we’ll get onto it.
We also speak to customers, because without these customers there is no market, there is no business. They tell us how we can improve from their perspective and what they’d like to see. To keep this fresh, we rotate this position on the board because different customers have different needs and priorities.
But just as we are always looking to develop our product to keep it fresh and innovative, we also want to make sure our advisory panel is full of opinions from all the areas of the industry. That is why we are looking for a representative from a union to join us to give a voice to their members and we’d also like to speak to local authorities as they are the people who issue these licenses. Councils want to make sure their licensing procedures are the best they can be because then customers know when they book a vehicle, they are in safe hands. With our product, we can help provide that piece of mind and the security – particularly for young people.
Because we also have a facility for companies, where they can keep track of the usage on company accounts and control times and costs to ensure staff don’t exploit the system, a voice from this sector can help us mould our product to give companies, be they private sector, charities local authorities who have a high private hire use, the most efficient way of tracking their spending.
Our current board members are from Manchester, which is where we are based and where we work closely with the Manchester business school. As we expand and more companies enjoy the benefits our product brings, we will expand the members of the board to fully reflect the diverse community which is zoom.taxi.