Digitization has given a new perspective to online taxi businesses. Taxis have always been one of the chosen means of commuting for people of all age groups, and the digital age has added a new twist to these regular outings in the form of virtual ride-hailing services. People now turn to mobile apps to bring a taxi to their location.
The market for such convenient ridesharing stood at US$85.8 Billion in 2021 and is only projected to grow. If you are an online taxi business owner, you can grab a good share of that market with the right taxi app.
However, instead of struggling with the conceptualization, development, and deployment of such a solution, the best way to go about this is to hire taxi app developers. They can create the right application for your business with their skills, knowledge, and experience.
Read on to learn about the many benefits such app developers have to offer your cab company.
Top 10 Reasons to Invest in Taxi App Development
1- App Developers Have the Required Technical Expertise
The mantra of the 21st century may be that every company is an IT company due to the proliferation of technology in every type of business. However, not everyone with a job is an IT developer.
As a business not connected with the IT field, your cab company is unlikely to have people who can develop the app you need.
Hence, if you hire taxi app developers from an external agency, you gain access to the people who can deliver the app you need. It saves you the hassle of searching for such experts for your company, hiring, and training them.
The changing nature of technology also means you may have to invest in employees’ upskilling if you hire them in-house.
But an external agency’s experts won’t make such demands of you. Instead, they would remain in line with the latest technological developments.
When outsourced to an app development service provider, you get an app that’s created using the best that the latest technological tools have to offer due to the in-house experts’ technical know-how.
2- Improved Customer Outreach Efforts
It’s no longer the days when people would hire cabs by stepping out to the street and waving their hands.
Instead, they prefer the convenience of booking one through an app. Thus, if you want to reach your target audience and let them become familiar with your brand, then you need to have an app.
Besides the basic service of hailing a taxi, your app also acts as a means to reach your customers personally.
The app will contain a customer feedback/help section through which they can directly contact your company and air their opinions. This added layer of personal touch would not be available otherwise, leading to a gap in the business relationship between the two.
With an app of your own, you can directly reach out to your customers via pop-ups of feedback forms, discount coupons for rides, ads about your services and upcoming events, etc.
This saves you money by not having to place your ads elsewhere and significantly increases the chances of the ad being noticed and acted upon. Thus, you can expect better conversions.
3- Cost Reduction
Operating a taxi company comes with tight margins as it is. Hence, you’d obviously like to save money wherever possible to improve your balance sheet.
But that’s easier said than done if you still rely on the in-house app development model. For one, you need to hire and pay skilled developers, which can cost you significantly.
In addition, there are overheads like office space and equipment costs. All for a project, while important, doesn’t constitute a core comment of your business.
Hiring a Taxi App developer by outsourcing the development task, on the other hand, saves you large amounts of needless expenses.
There are plenty of taxi app developers for hire in India and other such developing countries who can do a great job at competitive rates compared to experts from developed countries.
Their sheer volume ensures that you get the benefits of economies of scale, thereby reducing your overall costs. The currency exchange rates also play a significant role here, with developed economies’ currencies always being of higher value.
This combined help brings down your expenses and increases your profit margins.
4- Real-time Tracking
Knowing what a taxi of your company is doing at any time is vital to managing your business.
Not only does it make your drivers more productive, but it also ensures the safety of your vehicles and their passengers. Such real-time tracking using precise location is simply not possible without the use of an app.
The straightforward benefit of tracking is that it provides crucial information on the arrival time of the cab to customers upon hiring one.
Then, it provides the estimated arrival time at the destination, thus helping the passenger and you to keep an eye on the vehicle.
The details of every trip made by every cab can be tracked and added to your database for your reference at any moment. Should something not go according to the expected parameters, you can contact the driver and learn the reasons.
Alternatively, a passenger can contact your company and ask for assistance at any point in time. A good developer can add the necessary features to the app to enable this facility.
5- Improved Brand Building
The taxi-hailing space is crowded, with big-wigs like Uber occupying large market shares. Establishing yourself by cutting through this competition requires you to have a unique brand identity that your target audience can instantly relate to.
This includes having a distinct logo and app UI, along with other marketing material like jingles and ticker ads.
Furthermore, the branding efforts in your base market may not work in a different region. Therefore, if you plan to expand your business, there needs to be localization to make the app and your services more relatable to the crowd.
Hire taxi app developers, and your brand visibility and value will get a chance to skyrocket. Their expertise can help create a distinct identity for your company not just on the app drawer of the target audience’s phones but also everywhere your company’s ad gets shown.
They can create a UI that provides a great UX for the user, thus helping them favor your brand. By having an offshore development company helping you, your scaling efforts will also be easy since they can tailor the UI to suit local tastes and requirements better while still maintaining your brand’s distinct look and feel.
6- Aids in Gathering Valuable Customer Data
A large part of marketing today relies on targeting your audience with ads specific to their needs. This requires a lot of customer data that tells you about their demographic and behavior patterns.
Your taxi app can do that if developed by a capable expert. For each customer account, you can easily gather their personal information like contact number and email ID that they use to access the app.
The tracking feature also tells you about their usual travel patterns with key data points like average distance traveled, the usual route taken, location of usage.
You can create a customer profile with this valuable information and, with the right permissions, also push ads tailored to them based on this data.
7- Quick Turnaround Times
One of the greatest benefits when you hire taxi app developers is the quick completion of the project. Their familiarity with the development landscape means they can expedite the development process without compromising the quality.
Their access to the latest tools also helps with this speed. Besides the initial development, they can also push regular updates without hassles, ensuring that your business is in line with the competition.
8- High Data Security
Enterprise data crime is one of the biggest problems of the modern world, where cybercriminals are always trying to outwit companies to get to the latter’s data reserves.
You could be in a lot of operational, technical, financial, and legal trouble should you become a victim of an attack.
While it’s impossible to be completely safe, using a trained developer can give you not just an app but an entire IT ecosystem that keeps your company’s and your customer’s data safe.
The developers will employ the latest data security and privacy measures in the app during their operations to get complete protection on your terms.
9- Regulatory Compliance
Public transport via a private cab operation is subject to many laws you should comply with. Compliance becomes difficult given the chaotic nature of the business, coupled with the increase in this chaos with scaling and multi-market expansion.
A taxi app development company will be aware of the laws applicable to your business in your country and others where you operate. They can build an app that includes compliance so you can avoid the effects of not following them by accident.
10- Save Time
Time is of the essence in every business, especially for its top executives. And you can save a boatload of it with an external app developer for your taxi service since you won’t have to manage a team of them by yourself.
You can focus more on the core functions of your business with this time and help guide it in a better direction instead.
Conclusion
Mobility is an essential aspect when running a successful taxi business. It has also become the norm with everything else in people’s lives due to the growth of mobile telephony and the internet.
When you seek app developers for hire in India and other such developing countries that can work according to your requirements, you get to merge the two types of mobility- safety and cost-effectiveness in a way that helps you achieve your business goals while ensuring a satisfactory experience for your customers.
