Mercury Total – The best value taxi booking software package available

Mercury taxi booking software are launching their new, best value, all inclusive package – Mercury Total – at the PHM Show this year.  So if you wan’t to get your hands on the best value taxi booking software package on the market – the PHM Show 2012 is most certainly the place to be.

Our new Mercury Total Package includes:

• 12 month free trial of Mercury Desktop
• GUARANTEED FINANCE* – We are the only company providing guaranteed finance and low deposit deals
• Simple, easy to use, feature rich software – get set up and started straight away
• Our latest Panther PDA – With a large 3.5” Touch Screen, the latest Mercury Mobile OS and the most accurate Satellite Navigation for your drivers, updated twice a year guaranteed
• FREE Panther PDA* for every five you order
• Guaranteed Upgrade* to your PDAs -  Sign up with Mercury and get new PDAs after 2 years, all included in the price
• Mobile Network – Low price airtime and a choice of three major networks, all included in the price
• Stay connected with our Mercury Connect package, including Dual Broadband, Dual SIM and Quad SIM – make sure your business never stops runningTake credit card bookings immediately with FREE setup on Mercury Merchant and no monthly rental charges
  Text bookings and confirmations for a fixed monthly price with Mercury Text

Also at the show

We will have our industry expert on hand at our stand who will be providing ‘business health checks’ and giving an insight into running a private hire business – his experience covers topics including booking and despatch, factoring, account work, driver management and more.  Our expert has years of experience at all levels of running a taxi and private hire business, from driver to controller, to manager and now director of a large private hire fleet.  Come along and visit us at Stand 4 for your free business health check.

Why not pre-book an appointment to see a demo of Mercury taxi booking software – the best value system on the market

If you would like to pre book an appointment with us simply call us on 01623 442211 (option 2) and we can arrange for you to see a member of our sales team at the show – we will even book your place at the PHM show for you on your behalf!

Can’t make the show?

If you would like to see a demo of Mercury taxi booking software and you can’t make the PHM Show, don’t worry – call us on 01623 442211 (option 2) and we will arrange for a member of our sales team to come and visit you at a time convenient for you!

More information about the show!

The PHM Show is held at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry on Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31 May 2012.  You can click on the image below to find out more information!  We hope to see you at the show and look forward to showing you Mercury – the best value taxi booking software available!

Mercury taxi booking software – helping to grow Trafford Cars business

Trafford Cars pride themselves on covering a very large area with minimal waiting times – and they accomplish this using Mercury taxi booking software, which Trafford Cars credit as helping to grow their business by over 50% since it was installed over 10 years ago.  During that time they have doubled both their fleet size and the number of jobs they are taking.

The bespoke combination of Mercury Desktop, Mercury Mobile and Mercury Web really does the business, as they say… Trafford Cars found that Mercury taxi booking software was simple and easy to use, and brought about significant improvement to their business immediately.   Mercury Desktop was the first head turner – and Trafford Cars now find that they can’t work without it. They used to take 20 minutes to despatch 50 jobs during busy periods, now it just takes them a couple of seconds with Mercury Desktop.  Multiple pickups, avoiding overbooking, finding or editing a booking, real routing and keeping track of drivers are just some of they key features of Mercury taxi booking software that Trafford Cars make use of on a daily basis.  Accounts, management and driver reports are a particularly useful feature of Mercury taxi booking software for Trafford Cars, as account work contributes a third of their volume of work.

Mercury taxi booking software – Mercury mobile great for your drivers

Mercury Mobile really helps out drivers with job offers, status updates, no shows, call-back, GPS tracking, TomTom Sat Nav, Credit card payments – pretty much everything!  In fact Trafford Cars describe their taxi booking software as ‘incredible’!  Using Mercury has helped Trafford Cars to bring on more drivers – both in terms of attracting them to the business and managing their drivers on a daily basis.  The customer support provided by Mercury is deemed to be ‘excellent’.

So what’s next for Trafford Cars

It’s all happening for Trafford Cars, they have just launched their new website – on which customers can not only book online, but also get a quote for their journey!  They have also recently completed a full renovation of their offices, with major upgrades to the booking and call centres as well as driver facilities!

Find out more about Mercury taxi booking software

To find out more about Mercury taxi booking software, contact us via the reply form (at the top right of this page) or call 01623 442211

Join Lynsey Harrison, our Customer Relations Supervisor, as she explains how to quickly and easily add the new Olympic Village into your Mercury Plots.  This video is relevant for all those who operate in the London area and have plots setup to cover this area.  If you have any further questions you can contact Lynsey and the Customer Relations team on 01623 44 22 11 and select option ’4′.

Providing your taxi services to local businesses and organisations can provide your taxi business with a good level of account work.  This kind of work provides more stability to your business, in particular when working with the public sector, as contracts are usually fixed for a period of time and the work you receive remains constant. At Mercury we not only provide our customers with great taxi booking software, we also look for current opportunities for our customers to work with the public sector.  Every month we research the latest account work opportunities with the public sector – if you want to receive this information as well, simply use the form below to send us your details and we will email you the latest opportunities we find every month.

So what happens once you’ve got your account work?  Mercury taxi booking software provides you with the ability to handle your accounts easily; here are a just a few of the benefits you get from using Mercury taxi booking software to handle your account work:

• Regular bookings – Mercury taxi booking software can automatically repeat regular bookings for you – even taking into account any holiday periods.  All you need to do is enter into your taxi booking software the days and times a customer wants to make a regular booking.
• Helpful management reports – Using Mercury taxi booking software you can obtain a host of essential management reports quickly and easily.  Account work often requires detailed level of reporting – Mercury taxi booking software can help you manage your accounts easily
• Setting up new accounts – This is a quick and easy process with Mercury taxi booking software.  The process is flexible allowing you to set up different prices and rates for the different accounts you work with.  You simply specify how much you will charge the client and the amount you pay the driver.

Get the latest public sector opportunities from Mercury taxi booking software

Please enter your details into the form below:

Avoid payments over the phone where possible

Many of the reported incidents of fraud or dispute occur when the customer books and pays for your service over the phone using a card. It should always be a consideration that the card details being provided aren’t in fact those of the card holder, so where possible you should always try to take payments in the car where your driver can check the physical card.  With Mercury taxi booking software, your drivers are able to take credit card payments in their vehicle.

Build a checklist of the information you require

When you are taking payments over the phone, its important for your own protection that you put in place a check list procedure to ensure you have as much information to hand should there be any dispute. We have provided the following check list which may be of help;

1. Customers Full Name
2. Card Billing Address
3. Landline & Mobile Numbers
4. Full card Details, inclusive of card number, Expiry Date and Security Number
5. If the cardholder isn’t the person travelling, establish the relationship between them and the passenger
6. Full address of pick up and drop off

View and check the card

When taking payments onboard your vehicles always ask the driver to ensure that they view the card as an added form of security in addition to the check list. It would be wise to ask the cardholder to sign something, perhaps a custom sheet whereby the driver can fill in details and that it is a card transaction perhaps entering the last 4 digits of the card and ask the passenger to sign. This way, should a customer deny all knowledge of the journey, you have proof that the journey took place and that the card was presented for payment.

If it’s too good to be true

Always remember that if you suspect anything ask the passenger for a cash payment and assume that if a fare seems too good to be true, it’s likely that it is! Look out for fares that are well out of the ordinary, if there is a fraudulent transaction it will be a very high fare generally as it is not worth the effort for a minimum fare.

With the Olympics fast approaching, we wrote last month about making sure your taxi and private hire business was prepared so you could get the most out of one of the world’s largest events. With millions of visitors expected to the UK, there will be plenty of opportunities for you to increase your jobs and revenue – and as the Olympics is a national event across many different locations, this isnt just relevant to those in London.  Of course, making sure you are using taxi booking software like Mercury can help manage your business, drivers and bookings easily.

We are constantly on the lookout for helpful resources to help you manage your business – and this month we have found www.getaheadofthegames.com – a website that is dedicated to providing travel advice around the Olympics for the public and businesses alike.

How the Olympics will impact different areas

We had a look through the site to see what advice was on offer, and we found comprehensive travel pages for many different parts of the UK.  We’ve collected these for you and provided you with the links below.

• London
• Cardiff
• Weymouth and Portland
• Coventry
• Manchester
• Newcastle
• Glasgow
• Windsor and Eton
• Cheshunt and Waltham Cross
• Sevenoaks
• Leigh-on-Sea and Hadleigh
• Surrey

Mercury taxi booking software lets you take credit card payments easily

As a traditionally cash business, the thought of taking credit card payments can seem somewhat daunting to you as a business owner and your drivers as well.  There will of course always be reasons to not take card payments from your customers – but by not taking these types of payments you could be restricting your business, losing your competitive advantage and eventually your customers.  We’ve put together a list of reasons why Mercury taxi booking software customers should start taking card payments:

• If you are already a Mercury taxi booking software customer it is FREE to setup.  We have teamed up with Adelante, one of the UKs leading card payment solutions providers, to provide you with Mercury Merchant – a simple and easy solution to take card payments in your office and vehicles.
• You can increase your work, especially among the business community
• You can add a surcharge to passengers for providing a card payment option – which means you can not only cover the costs of providing this to your customers, but also increase your revenue!
• By taking card payments you can ensure that the money arrives directly into your bank account instead of waiting for drivers to give you the cash.
• You don’t have to have a Merchant account already – Adelante’s TaxiPay solution means you can get started without having to setup a merchant account or rent any terminals!  You can instantly save money on any existing PDQ rentals you already have.
• Take credit card payments directly in your office using Mercury taxi booking software
• Your drivers actually see the card whilst taking payment, are able to check the details of the card – this significantly reduces any chance of fraud.
• Mercury taxi booking software produces a Card Transaction report, which details the booking number and the amount of the Fare, Tip and Surcharge so it is easy to keep track of what has actually been taken on Card.
• Adelante provide an online facility which details each transaction with the original booking number as the reference, this makes it easy to find any transaction should a query arise.

Already using Mercury taxi booking software?

Take advantage of our FREE Setup offer on Mercury Merchant – our credit and debit card payment service.  Contact us on 01623 442211 and select option ’4′ or email richard.morley@exelmanagement.com for more information

New to Mercury taxi booking software?

To utilise the Mercury credit card payment function you also need to have Mercury taxi booking software as your preferred choice of software. Take advantage of our latest offer – FREE taxi booking software for 12 months.

Generally, getting to number 1 on google and other search engines is the number one thing on your mind when you think about your ‘online presence’. I am pretty much obsessed with the search rankings we achieve for our products, and can take it rather personally when I see us fall a few places on Google and other search engines. From experience I know it can take a lot of effort (and often money) in achieving a good search position – but it really depends on the competition for the top spots for that search term.

Here are some tips I would give on how to get stated with investing your time, rather than money, in trying to achieve that number one spot:

• Keyword research – make sure you know what keywords you want to target – so you need to be sure about what your prospects and customers are searching for online. A good tool to measure this is the ‘keyword tool’ on Google Adwords (you can sign up for free to use this) – this gives you an idea of the number of searches carried for each search term you test.
• Monitor your progress – Optimising your site to get to the number one spot on Google will take some time, and you will undoubtedly have some ups and downs along the way. You should register for a free website monitoring tool that you can log into so you can track how well your site performs. A good free site to use would be sescout.com – which gives you basic information on how well your website is going on Google and Bing
• Local search is key for taxis and private hire – Google and the other search engines are constantly improving their user experience. More recently they have focused on ‘local search’ – providing their users with content that is relevant and local to them. This has changed the game for many industries including those in the taxi and private hire industry. You should definitely make sure your Google Places page is complete and up to date – to take advantage of showing up in local seach results – this can propel you to the top of Google very quickly as local search results take precedence over national ones. Read my article on setting up your Google Places page.
• Make sure your website contains the right content – If you want to get to that number 1 spot on the search engines then you definitely need to make sure that the content you put on your site is relevant to the search terms you want to be number one for. Making sure you have important keywords in the title of your pages, the heading tags of your pages and also in any of the copy you write for your pages is vital. If you don’t know how to update your own website (I find that many people have employed others to do this for them) – then we suggest using WordPress – a free website management tool that allows you to quickly add and change content on your own website. If you want to find out more about this you can always drop me an email at richard.morley@exelmanagement.com
• Directories – Make sure you are included on all directories online (e.g. yell.com) – these sites are already highly ranked and credible source of information for search engines – so getting your business listed on here could you get to that number one spot (albeit not with your own website). They also provide links to your site – which is important for search engines (and what you usually end up paying experts to do – but I wont go into ‘backlinking’ at this stage – if you want to find out more you can always Google it!).
• Make sure your site is mobile friendly – the amount of searches carried out on mobile devices is ever on the increase – so make sure your site can convert easily for Mobile devices (for when they find you at no 1) – again WordPress can be easily modified to identify mobile phone users and show them a cut down, easier to read version of your site (it’s so easy to do this using WordPress with just a few clicks of your mouse)
• Using Facebook and Twitter – Many of your users use Facebook and Twitter – so getting yourself on there can help to grow awareness of your website and business. Many of our customers have used this and achieved some good results – there will be some groups of people
• Getting clever with your website address – think about what your customers and prospects will search for and buy domains that contain those words – for example if you were a taxi or private hire business in Nottingham you could consider using ‘taxisnottingham.co.uk’ (if it were available to purchase) – this makes your website address highly relevant to the searches that are being used to find taxi services in your area.

Remember, getting to number 1 on a search engine takes time, effort, patience (and often money!) and you will have some disappointments along the way – some weeks your search results will improve and on other occasions you will find your results have decreased. It’s a long term game – you have to keep investing your time in maintaining your search presence, particularly if your competition are investing time as well.

Further information

If you would like any further advise on your online search and advertising strategy, please contact Richard Morley on richard.morley@exelmanagement.com.

Make sure you are heard – Click here to take the LPHCA Survey

On 19 July 2011, The Law Commission announced that it was starting a review of the legislation that governs taxi and private hire vehicles – so basically the law that affects your day to day jobs.  This is a really crucial time for the taxi and private hire industry – particularly when you consider that some of the laws that exist already for taxi and private hire vehicles have been in existence since the 19th Century – so it doesn’t take a genius to realise that these probably aren’t fit for purpose anymore!

When is the review happening?

We are currently in what is called a ‘pre consultation phase’ – this is where The Law Commission gathers information and prepare to issue a consultation paper.  This consultation paper will be issued in April or May 2012 and this will set out draft proposals for the reform of the legal framework within which you operate at the moment.

Following the issue of the consultation paper, there will be a three month review period – which is really when it is your time to respond to the contents of The Law Commission’s proposal – and this period will end around July or August 2012.  Once the consultation is over and all the responses have been looked at a draft bull will be published in November 2013 – and should be become legislation by no later than 2015.

What is the review looking at?

Some of the key issues that the review seeks to address are:

• Safety – not only in terms of vehicles and drivers, but also thinking about our customers.  This is something that could be looked at nationally and then filtered down at a local level
• Availability – This is particularly important, as we are now seeing many different ways in passengers booking a taxi or private hire vehicle
• Quality – the quality of service is an important issue that needs to be looked at
• Responsiveness to local needs – particularly how London is considered in relation to the rest of the UK

You can also expect some of the more recent emerging issues to appear as well:

• Boundaries in the two tier system of Taxis and PHVs – should the current system in the way these operate differently be abolished
• Enforcement in general and cross-border – cross county enforcement and outdated jurisdictions
• Striking the balance – availability and national and local standards
• Access and disabilities
• Overall excessive uncertainty – because it is so outdated there is considerable uncertainty in the legal framework

Make sure you are heard

At Mercury we are eagerly awaiting the issue of the consultation paper – and we will be looking to respond on our customers behalf during the consultation phase.

The Licensed Private Hire Car Association (LPHCA) are currently conducting an ‘in confidence’ survey to start understanding the position of taxi and private hire companies across the UK.  We think that its a good idea to complete this survey and get yourself heard at an early stage – you can visit the LPHCA website and complete the survey by following this link.

Everyone’s been talking about the London Olympics for some time – but now we’re  in 2012 we only have 18 weekends to go until the torch relay starts on 18th May 2012.  This really is an important time for the UK, being host to the Olympic Games, which is in effect having 26 world championships all occurring at the same time, in 30 different venues across the UK.  In total there will be 10 million tickets available for the Olympic Games, and an additional 10 million people are expected to arrive to see non-ticketed events.

Getting your taxi or private hire business ready for the Olympics

One of the more contentious aspects of the Olympic Games is the Olympic Route Network – which is essentially a network of roads which connect the Olympic village to all of the competition venues and training venues.  The aim of this road network is to get the Olympic athletes and the media to the venues on time.

On this road network there will be no road works, street works and on about a third of the network some lanes will only be for the use of vehicles associated with the Olympics.  The road network is available for the public to use, with only two roads which non games vehicles cannot use.

In addition to the road network, the competition venues also have staging areas, drop zones and load zones – all the planning you would expect to get large numbers of people in and out of venues quickly.

Be prepared and make the most of this opportunity!

• Transport is not just between venues, but also will involve transfers to other airports, train stations, hotels – so start working with these now where possible (particularly hotels) to get a level of discount in place for their guests and to get regular business during this busy time
• There will be more people working early hours who will need transport if they are unable to use their normal means of transport
• There will be more people sightseeing and visiting in the UK and London
• Many corporate businesses and sponsors will be attending the games (some say over 50,000 sponsors will be in attendance) – again, this provides opportunities for increased amounts of work.
• Make sure you check out Transport for London’s web site – http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/projectsandschemes/18196.aspx which shows you plans for changes made by the Olympic Route Network

How Mercury taxi booking software can help your taxi or private hire business during the Olympics (and every other day for that matter!)

The Olympics does provide the private hire and taxi sector with opportunity if we remain prepared for the changes to the road network that these events will bring as well.

• With Mercury taxi booking software you can book and despatch a job in seconds
• Mercury taxi booking software will never let you overbook
• With pinpoint accuracy Mercury taxi booking software lets you despatch jobs to the closest vehicle
• Up-to-date streets and maps are included with Mercury taxi booking software
• Your drivers who are using Mercury Mobile can navigate with ease to their destination, with the in-built Tom Tom functionality
• Using Mercury taxi booking software – you will always know where you are
• Mercury taxi booking software lets you setup and manage your accounts with eas

Find out more about Mercury taxi booking software

To find out more about Mercury taxi booking software and how it can help you grow your business please call us on 01623 442211.  Alternatively click here to view our special offer for 2012!