Akshay Kumar – Mumbai
Taxi For Sure, radio taxi and cab booking service, is all set to enter the Mumbai market. Currently Taxi For Sure is operational in thirteen major Indian cities namely; Ahmedabad, Aurangabad, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mysore, Nagpur, Nashik, Pune, Rajkot, Vadodara and Surat with more than 7,000 drivers and as many as 400 operators.
Raghunandan G, co-founder Taxi For Sure, said, “The dry run had started a month back and we are operational in Mumbai, very soon we will make the formal announcements.” Speaking about the major challenges in Mumbai Raghunandan added, “Mumbai is a city that is already well connected in terms of transportation, as compared to other Indian cities. The cab using segment comprises a major chunk of the population, but we are making constant endeavours to ensure guaranteed bookings and on-time service keeping in mind the traffic woes and long distances that people need to travel every day.”
Taxi For Sure has seen 700 per cent growth since August 2013, and surpassed more than three million customers to date. The company also has plans to extend its services to 56 cities by next year.
Raghunandan said, “The response from the cities we operate has been phenomenal, we had announced promotional offers for each city at the time of launch which helped us attract more customers and now we have a large percentage of repeat customers in all cities. This goes to show that we have extremely brand loyal customers who are satisfied with our service. We also have drivers who have worked with us and are now successful operators, running their own fleet of cabs.”
When asked about new tie-ups with the local mode of transportation, Raghunandan mentioned, “Adding to our existing fleet and tying up with other modes of transportation is an area we plan to enter, but we want to be extremely confident of the operational issues involved as well as ensure that we do not come across as a threat to auto drivers, but join hands with them so that both parties are mutually benefited from this merger. As of now we have not planned to tie-up with local transports in Mumbai. However, we are open to explore this in the future as the demand will increase. Currently we are trying for such tie-ups in Bengaluru, following which we shall expand the same to other cities as well.”
Speaking about investments in the technology segment Raghunandan stated, “We at Taxi For Sure prefer to build everything in-house and do not purchase software services as much as possible. We own the technologies that connects a customer to a cab driver. As a technology company we invest heavily in our own people and partnerships with leading academic institutions. Developing core algorithms for booking and cab dispatch engines, leveraging big data insights to connect our customers to services more effectively and creating beautiful, easy-to-use consumer experiences through app development are our key focus.”