Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Getting to Know SmartMove Systems with Jason Lawrie, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Getting to Know SmartMove Systems with Jason Lawrie on the Contact Center Cactus Chat. Eric sits down with SmartMove CEO Jason Lawrie to find out how their company elevates taxi & transportation businesses in Australia and all over the US, especially helping those with small fleets.  

Hey everybody, welcome to the Contact Center Cactus Chat Podcast. I'm your host Eric Malvin and this is a special episode. We're coming to you from Las Vegas at Caesars Palace. We're at the Mobilize Taxi Association conference here and we've got some special guests. We've got a special guest that's traveled probably the furthest out of anybody here at the conference. Jason, Lori from Australia all the way from what part of Australia you guys in? Adelaide in South Australia. Adelaide, all right. You guys just beat our Phoenix Suns in a pre-season basketball game. Yeah, I saw that. It was quite impressive.

So, all right, well we're excited. We're going to be talking today about their business, Smartmove Systems, and what they do to help taxi companies and fleet operators in Australia and soon in the US. And so once you introduce yourself to the audience here, tell us about Smartmove and what you do there. Okay. Well, I'm Jason Laurie, the CEO of Smartmove. We've been creating a taxi dispatch system over the last 17 years.

We're in about 130 fleets across Australia and New Zealand, and fleet sizes that range from two cars up to over 200. And yeah, we want to be able to bring that same passion and experience to the US market. And I think that we'll be able to find a good fit here. Yeah, absolutely. I know we've been talking for a while. This has been a dream of your guys' for some time. COVID obviously has changed everybody's plans

and strategic ideas that they were trying to accomplish. But how are things going in the Australia world with the transportation and taxi companies out there? Yeah, I mean, obviously COVID had a dramatic effect there as well. And, you know, a lot of the fleets are starting to build up and recover. A lot of the, especially the tourist destinations were hit the hardest. So they're having a bit more of a struggle but yeah we're you know we're growing and we're finding that we're able to you know help these

fleets be able to get back on their feet um through you know looking at other options either being able to outsource their call center or partially outsource and just be able to you know be flexible and grow yeah and i know you guys work a little bit with the smaller fleets you don't work with the massive ones what are some of the ways that you guys are able to help these smaller ones because we started out as a taxi company 10 11 years ago with 10 cars and i remember the struggle it was running a fleet where you're doing 20 different things every day and it's just this is really difficult so how do you guys help the those fleets yeah well our systems being built from the ground up to four small fleets so one of the main ways is that we provide for call centres to be able to handle many fleets at the same time.

We have five different larger call centres in Australia and they handle up to 30 fleets each. And so they're able to provide a service for a small taxi fleet of a couple of cars that normally wouldn't be worth them working with it because it's so easy to sort of click in and get those fleets going they're able to service them and it doesn't make it too much harder so that scalability and being able to give the features and the benefits of the software the latest innovation and stuff to the fleets that are small that normally would have think okay we can't afford

that kind of system. Well now pricing and stuff just scales per car so it doesn't matter if big, small, they can still get access to those features and those benefits to their customers and themselves. Yeah and that's really what attracted me to you guys because we have to turn those people away. Typically, you know, when they ha they only have two, three cars or five cars, it's really not in the budget to afford a full-time call center agent taking calls when, you know, many times these guys are, the drivers are the one answering the phone or the owner and you know,

he's juggling that. So they know that they need to get this off of their plate so they can grow their company. But how do you make that jump and it sounds like you guys really helped companies figure that out yeah yeah and there's been so many companies that have said you know once they've come with us it's so much less stress and they say oh we should have done this years ago just because you know they are juggling so many things but we try to let them get back to what they're good at which is both either driving

or growing their own business not having to worry about other different aspects that may not be you know their main their main yeah business yeah that's what we're always telling people like you did not start a taxi company to start a call center but here you are trying to manage it and it's taking up all your time meanwhile you don't don't have enough drivers. You're, you know, you've got to fix this and this and this. So yeah, that's really awesome. Another thing about you guys, so we talk on the podcast, we like to talk about customer experience

and you guys play a huge role in that. So what do you guys do to make the customer experience really great for the end customers for these fleets? Yeah, well, we provide a, I mean, because we've got 130 different fleets, we've got lots of different options for the fleets to be able to tailor the experience the way that they're used to working. So we provide a lot of rules for the fleet so that they can say, OK, if so-and-so rings in, then make sure that this automatically gets set because they always want this driver or something like that

so that even though it's being outsourced to another call centre, that kind of local knowledge is translated in there and it's never forgotten. So that's one key aspect of still providing that small business service but with a sort of expanded concept. We also have a lot of ways to be able to do bookings you know you've got the the apps we've got websites that can be tailored to particular hotels or medical centers or airports and things so fleets were able to set those up and

get that so that their account customers can have a great experience track their own stuff. The apps we try to make as customer friendly as possible we integrate with either our own IVR or other IVR systems to make it so they don't have to wait on hold in busy times and a lot of other settings to be able to balance the the drivers being able to get to bookings in an efficient way notifications SMS's you know whatever communication works best to be able to so the drivers can connect with those customers and give them the best experience possible.

That's incredible because I know a lot of these smaller fleets without a system like your guys, it would be impossible to be able to offer all of those booking features and the notifications for the customers. So, yeah, that's really incredible. Do you have any stories about success stories from Australia where they were able to, like a small fleet started with you guys, they were able to get things loaded off and then they were able to grow because they could focus on growing? Yeah, I mean, we've had a number of fleets

that have sort of, you know, people have come to us and said, oh, we're only a couple of cars, can we sort of get in, get started? I think one of the biggest growth stories, we had a fleet that started with just a couple of cars in Canberra, capital of Australia, and they grew to, I think, 150 cars. Wow. So, I mean, COVID had a bit of an impact, but they're still up there, over 100 cars. So, you know, we've seen quite a few test stories where you

know start small and they had ambitions and yeah they managed to pull it off so they were happy to be able to be part of that and help them you know and the the growth wasn't a problem because we were able to just yeah okay you want a new new cars pop them on yeah it, it's really easy. Yeah, that's great. Because I feel like, because we've started the call center, we've been running it for about seven years now, and we've seen a lot of that from our own clients too, where now they're not managing the call center and they're able to start doing some of the business goals that they wanted to do,

whether it's adding on another service or going after another market or even buying up, acquiring other companies. They're able to focus on that uh so i'm with 130 fleets you said right in australia so i'm sure you've got plenty of stories like that across the country i'm guessing yeah yeah and you know make us mostly we've focused on the sort of regional areas of australia because there's lots of small towns all around and you know that's where we started and that's where we've grown and that's why we've got so many fleets and you know so many of them are just you know sort of local you know into the local area and you know give them back and that's where we had to sort of make sure that

we give them all the benefits and just being able to take that load off and reduce the amount of time that they're putting into invoicing and doing all the back-end stuff so that they can just take that focus and say, okay, well, how do we make this better? Yeah. And I think that's been a big realization from the whole industry over the last five to 10 years. Maybe almost by force. Like like you have no choice if you don't figure this out

Your competitors are figuring it out and you've got to catch up. Otherwise, you're not gonna be around anymore So and it's the customer service that's gonna make people sort of stick to you and you know be that have that loyalty Okay, I know that They give good service i'm just going to keep going back to them so you know letting them focus on that is yeah yeah definitely well uh how did you you're with this being the ceo how did you get this started what got you into running a dispatch system in the taxi industry like smart move okay um i mean i only took over a ceo in the last couple of years my former boss was the one that got it he had a couple of people from the

taxi industry come to him and say we've got this idea of running a taxi system using a mobile network rather than radio based which 17 years ago was quite innovative yeah and you know so he looked at it and thought well that's a good idea so we got patent on that and sort of move forward with the software development we were a software company at that time a defense contractor so it was quite a different idea and so then started growing found a few fleets that were willing to take a chance on this new concept and yeah grew from there so i was a software developer at that point helping to build the thing and so recently he retired and I took over as CEO. Okay software developer to now running the company. Yeah, so sort of software

developments in my blood. I mean our company is still software development at core but yeah just focused on taxis. I think more than 60% of our employees are software developers so you know keeping the system innovating and adding things is very much part of what we do. We want to improve constantly all of the ideas and the things that we put into our software generally come from our customers saying, Oh, can we do this? And we go, Oh, that's a great idea.

And that'll be useful to all the fleets. So we add it and the system gets better and better. Yeah, that's a great idea and it better be useful to you know all the fleets so we add it and yeah system gets better and better yeah that's great where do you see the because you've been a part of a lot of the change in australia not trying to bring it here uh where do you see the industry going in the next five to ten years um if you could even predict that far I know it's changing so fast so it's kind of hard to see that far out but yeah well I guess continuing to focus on giving customers that good experience is key to getting to the 10 years there's going to be come a lot more focus on account work and getting into, I guess, corporate and the NEMT and providing services and capabilities that allow them to be able to get the information they want and be able

to self-manage their own bookings to a certain extent because they want to be able to get to that information. They want the confidence that the booking's gone in, that they know that it's going to be coming and be able to control all of that. So that's a lot of what we're building in the short term. Further beyond that, it gets a bit tricky. I know. Yeah, because I don't think if I had asked you that question five years ago,

you probably would have never been able to guess what's happened over the last couple of years here. Yeah, and being able to adapt to that kind of thing is, I think, one of our strengths because we're so focused on the software development side and improving things. We were able to very quickly adapt to providing our customers ways to do food delivery and things like that during COVID, where in Australia, at least, they were authorized to be central workers for delivering groceries or food and things while everybody was locked down. So we were able to quickly adapt, put that in and allow them to be able to keep working,

even though they weren't able to transport passengers that became a lot more important. Yeah that's huge, I mean they made a big difference for the drivers, for the fleet operators, they were still able to make some income. Yeah and just being able to sort of be adaptable, be ready to change with the customers what they need it's important definitely I mean we had to do the same with the call center and adjust when things I think everybody lost half of their business or more overnight so it was a lot of pivoting and adjusting which it sounds like you know you guys have done to started out as defense contract software and now fleet

transportation management system. And let's see, I want to touch on one other thing, too, because you guys work with call centers and outsourcing. And so that's what we do. What's some of the feedback you get from the fleets when they finally give up the calls and they're able to stop answering the phones all the time? Because I would imagine that's got to be really freeing for them and liberating yes um well i mean again that's very much a why didn't we do this sooner uh just because um you know if that's if that's not their passion that's not what they want to be doing then it makes it so much easier. It also becomes quite cost effective as well because you know having running a 24x7 call center when you've only got a few cars

is very cost prohibitive so you know we've been able to have it so that if they really want they can can take calls during the busy times and then offload during the other times most a lot of fleets sort of start out that way because they think oh you know we still want to be able to do ourselves during the busy times almost all of them inevitably go fully um remote because they just find the quality is still there um and it's easier so okay we'll try it for a while and then yeah yeah it sounds a lot like when clients start working with us too, sometimes they'll start with like one or two agents, like, let's see how this goes or give us some slower shifts.

And then once they start seeing like what they were hoping to see, then they start expanding it and growing it. And they're like, okay, I can step back and turn that over to you guys. So, all right, well, this is your guys's first trip out to the states for as smart movement maybe you've been here before but uh as uh as you guys are here promoting the company uh what are you guys hoping to what's the message you're trying to get out to everybody and what are you trying to let everyone know um we'll share it on the podcast too yeah well i guess we're just trying to let everybody know that we're here.

In Australia, we find that we're known in the industry. Everybody knows us and respects us, so we want to be able to come out here and say, look, we have some real expertise. Fleets benefit by using us. Take a look at us and you'll you'll find that you know we're a great way to be able to use your dispatch services so yeah just sort of be able to get known and have an opportunity to be able to demonstrate our system confident it will fit the needs yeah i think you guys are going to do great here because i've talked to so many smaller fleets over the past i don't know how many few months over this

summer and i've talked to people that are still using radio i'm like how are you still using radio like it's such an old technology for transportation. So I see a lot of opportunity for a lot of fleets that could start working with you guys. So I'm excited to see where you guys go over the next year. Hopefully you have a lot of success from the trip. Well, Hey, thank you so much for being a guest on our podcast. And if people want to learn more about smart move systems or want to maybe do a demo with you guys, how do they get in touch with you guys?

Yep, well, you can go to our website, smartmovesystems.com. That'll be the easiest way. You can contact us there through either a call or a web form, and we'll be more than happy to set up a demo. All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for being on, and we'll catch you on the

next episode. See you guys.