On reaching the destination, the customer is given a printed bill. The customer can choose to pay either by cash or credit card. The operations centre keeps recording the details of the whole process, right from pick-up to billing.

Starting up
Rajiv K Vij of Easycabs, believes that the taxi business in India will follow the same pattern of development, as it did in cities like Singapore, London, Paris, Toronto and New York. That is it will take some time for the service to get established in a city and then there will be exponential growth. This seems true, given that Megacab has been around since 2002 but it was only in December 2006 that it really took off in a big way. Kunal Lalani of Mega Group says that “it took quite some time to hold talks with the government to put policies in place. More time was taken for people to realise the value of Radio Cabs.” The beginning of 2007 saw the market open up for Radio Cabs in Delhi.

Easycabs did its trial run in June 2006 in Chandigarh with a small fleet of 50 cabs. It tested the backend system, sourced from Singapore, and the overall business model before it got clearance for Delhi. Easycabs started with a fleet of 250 cabs in Delhi on January 1, 2007. They also have an affiliation with Hertz.

Megacab did not really do a test run. Lalani opted for the live trail model, starting off in a small way. Megacab has around 300 cabs in its Delhi fleet currently.

Revathi Roy, who owns Forsche in Mumbai, has a different tale to tell. Forsche (homophonous to Porsche, pronounced ‘For She’), is a rather unique player in this business, launched on International Women’s Day in March 2007. It is a ladies-only cab service with lady-chauffeurs – a niche carved within a niche. Roy started the business with a single cab. Even that single cab came on lease, after a lot of persuasion and shooting down by several companies she approached. “It was only when media started talking about my business that several companies approached me with a good number of cars” says Roy. Luckily for her, the cars that she got had pre-installed GPRS trackers. With no automated backend, she has 18 cabs in her fleet– all on lease. She plans to buy her first lot of cars soon, and start operations in Delhi from October.

Workforce
Radio Cabs are not mass transportation vehicles. It costs much more to the commuter and is also more personal. Therefore, offering quality services becomes top priority. The chauffeur is the ambassador of the brand, it is crucial to select the best ones for the fleet. Chauffeurs are typically taken through a number of training programmes These include driving skills as well as soft skills, like manners, hygiene, etiquette etc, For a fleet of say 350 cabs out on the road, there are about 400 chauffeurs working in shifts. They are on fixed salary plus normal incentives. As the utilization of the fleet goes up, this count will also have to be upped.

As for the operators (at operations centers), trained workforce is easily available. Currently, the number of operators managing the backend of each operator in Delhi is about eight.

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written by Bhavendra Kumar Jha, July 12, 2008

Good one
Too good...excellent business sense..very astute.

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