Heroes in Business - Eric Mulvin, Working with a Taxi Contact Center Part 2, Contact Center Cactus Chat

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Eric and Jake get right into where they left off, offering solutions in dealing with difficulties with passengers and dispatching, plus finding balance in making the right calls in this episode of the Contact Center Cactus Chat.

Welcome to the Contact Center Cactus Chat Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Malvin, coming to you from sunny Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm your co-host, Jay Kayang, from Dumagiri City, Philippines. I'm a serial entrepreneur, started my first business 10 years ago, and six LLCs later, I started PacBiz Contact Center Outsourcing in 2015. Today, we have over 200 employees growing. And I'm the operations manager here in PackBiz and I've been working with Eric since 2014 and I grew as the company grew. So whether you're looking to outsource for the first time, whether you manage a contact center, or you're just looking to improve your customer experience, we'll be covering topics for you.

So business managers, operations managers, business owners, this is for you so make sure to subscribe uh i would like there we go what is uh this uh why is this patching different than uh you know outsourcing your customer calls oh yeah that's a great question so customer calls it's pretty basic you people call in i need to here, I need to get there. We're just collecting information. We're just collecting addresses, maybe some details. How many passengers are there? Do they have any luggage? If it's a medical appointment and we're working with a medical transportation company, there could be a couple other questions that we have to ask. If they need a wheelchair, things like that. But it's still just collecting information. When you get over to the driver side of things and dispatching, now you're starting to have to make some decisions.

It's not just, oh, let me take that address down and making sure that we have it accurately. Now we're actually having to decide, okay, we got two customers that need a ride. One person has been waiting for 30 minutes, another person's waiting for 15 minutes. And now you got a driver that's sitting in the middle, where do you send this driver?

And we're starting to have to make decisions like that. Now these days, the computer handles a lot of the decisions, but when you have dozens of calls an hour if even if you're a small fleet then we have clients that we work with that have ten cars well you have to manage those resources even more closely because you only have ten cars if you send them out to the wrong locations and you have more customers calling in now you don't have any calves to take care of them maybe you made the wrong choice sending them to the wrong place so it all comes down to you need people down to be able to

think and make decisions and and need to know what's the best choice to make whether i'm sending it to this place or that place um and when you're outsourcing you know we talked in the last episode again about the customers and the drivers there's really three sets of customers with taxi companies there's the corporate clients the customers and the drivers so the drivers are a big part of that they have got to work with the other two different groups there so that's where I see the big differences. And that's why you do need a bit of a different skill set. You can't just throw someone right into dispatching. You have to know a bit about the area. You have to know about the

company and what the rules are around the different places for picking up so how do we manage that for for the companies when we are so far away yeah of course the I would say that the skills would you know we come out and take care of that yeah we always try to make sure that everything is balanced and you know for you know for sometimes we even say that you know being frank to the customers that we can't cover this job you know considering that the you know the location of the customers so we done right before we just you know as much as possible we do pick them up and you put in the order, hoping that someone ... It's always been... There are lots of drivers waiting, so you would not be worried

about those customers not being picked up. They're always being picked up but you know as after the you know the when we have this driver shortage and you know the the problem is this cancer problem showing up so one thing that would matter that i see is that if if the drivers are not taken care of and you know there are things that are you know taken care of and there are things that they don't see that is fair to them in the company. They can use a different platform and just work for other companies and they have different experiences with different companies and they can measure up and weigh or they can weigh which company is better and so that's another thing if if you're if you have a dispatcher that doesn't take care of

them doesn't listen to them and you know they're if they're not they feel like they're not being listened to if they have these issues you know that's the problem is gonna start and they don't you know they don't they might not be you know logging in to your company and might choose a different one so it's you know there's a balance what's going on around the world right now and especially in the UK there's there's a problem with the drive the you know every every situation creates a problem and all you need to do is to listen to them and just to make sure that those are being addressed. There's a certain level of problem that can be addressed by dispatchers. So we will try our best to take

care of that and there's also a problem that can be addressed by the management so we always make sure that we report those problems so that the management would know that they're having these issues with the drivers because the sometimes the drivers the the owners doesn't know the drivers would call in and say this I have a problem with this and that you know when I went to the airport the the I wasn't informed I didn't know when I checked there was the problem with you know the the flight number that that he doesn't say that it's delayed for two hours and I went there and you know waited for the passenger to come out and I didn't realize whenever it wasn't

really there that the passenger will the plane will arrive in two hours. So another two hours wasted by the driver while he's there. Because you would wait for a chance that you're hoping that somebody from the airport will go out and you can take those passengers to where they want to go. And that way you will be going back and you know empty so those are the scenarios but what if what if there's I mean you know you what if you don't have anything and you will wait there for two hours and you know that's two hours waited wasted of your time and sitting

while you can go around and you know if you were not if you were just informed it you know there's a delay or stuff like that and yeah it's it it matters so if you have this dispatchers are good at what they do and you know with the law with long experiences this this problems could could be avoided and yeah I just need to take care of the drivers the same way as we take care of the customers and from there you know if you have more drivers because we can you can deny the fact that right now we have more bookings and drivers available so if you always have drivers around most of the bookings will be

picked up without any delays without can't we don't know cancellations and that would put your name of business you know very good and people would just rely and trust your company for for this kind of job so it's you know it's now there's so many factors that could make your business I mean a success and this is so many these are little things that contribute to it and if you're if you would just if you miss taking care of one aspect of the business especially in the driver's side or probably in the call taker side you know it has a chain effect it will you know it will give different results and you know and you know all you need to do is just you know balance things and make sure that you everything is taken care of and as for our side as a call center or a

dispatcher we our people are trying to do and to make sure that the driver's are taking care of all right well thank you guys for listening that's a the end of our two-part series here for taxi fleet owners and again last time we talked about customer calls this episode was the driver calls thank you so much for sharing your knowledge alright so make sure you subscribe if you want to hear more stuff about outsourcing your your customer support and outsourcing dispatching keep keep listening on we'll keep talking about this and, uh, more episodes. So thank you guys for listening. And, uh, thanks for, uh, thanks for following the contact center. See you guys next time. See you guys. Thank you.