As you may know by now, iCabbi has made a major investment in Google technology on behalf of our customers. iCabbi’s custom taxi dispatch system will harness Google’s sophisticated Fleet Engine intelligence and live data feeds to deliver an incredibly powerful solution to the taxi industry.
This article will give you an outline of key Google features and enhancements coming soon, and explain the impact they will have for your fleet.
We are proud to be the first-ever B2B passenger dispatch provider to secure such a partnership with Google. Building on the Google tech stack will deliver a leap in taxi technology innovation not seen since iCabbi first put taxi into the cloud.
Your Drivers and Passengers will now be able to get features and enhancements that until now have only been available to users of the global ridehail apps. In addition, Fleet Managers will benefit from new capabilities such as precision ETAs, real-time routing and new, hyper-intelligent dispatch rules.
The Google integration journey will roll out over many phases and will be a key part of our roadmap in 2024 and beyond. Our product R&D team has been working in tandem with the Google dev team during 2023 to prepare the iCabbi environment for the Google integration. This groundwork has already enabled us to deliver Google turn-by-turn navigation embedded in the driver app job flow. Google Turn by Turn is currently available on iOS and will be available on Android in the coming weeks.
Next up, iCabbi customers can expect a big leap in On Demand user experience.
- Passengers will get precision ETAs, based on Google Maps real time data. This helps to manage expectations, give autonomy to passengers, and build trust with your taxi fleet.
- Passenger experience will further be heightened by the same level of accuracy in relation to how long their taxi trip will take.
- Passengers will get greatly improved fare estimates, so they can be confident when booking a trip that they know how much it will cost them at the end. This is because of the enhanced trip time prediction informed by historical data and live traffic feeds. (Note: this feature is of particular interest to North America and Europe).
- Passengers and Drivers will benefit from Passenger Live Locations which will make it far easier for Drivers to find their pick-up. So, less confusion and frustration, faster pick-up times, and a reduction in no-shows and cancellations. Everyone wins here!
Fleet Managers will see further leaps in innovation in relation to the increased intelligence they can now apply a single, unified ETA across all products within the iCabbi platform will streamline the dispatching environment. Your dispatch rules will be able to automatically respond and adapt to real-time scenarios.
Dispatch by ETA is one of the first features fleets will get. Passengers will get shorter wait times, while drivers and fleets benefit from reduced down-time.
Dynamic Auto Soon to Clear delivers a significant enhancement to an existing feature. Right now, it is a static offering. Once a driver is selected it is not reevaluated. With the new version, Google’s fleet engine will consistently evaluate your fleet for vehicles dropping in an area where there is a new booking and select the best driver. This gives a better ETA to the passenger and fewer deadmiles for drivers.
There In Time is a new feature with benefits for everyone. If a driver has a pre-booked trip they will not receive any job offers for ASAP bookings that they cannot service in time to make their pre-booking. This uses Google Fleet Engine to evaluate live journey time estimates to determine if a driver can make it to the ASAP passenger, onboard them, drop them, and then make their way to their pre-booking pickup. If they can’t get there in time they will automatically be excluded from the ASAP job offer. There In Time will reduce driver delays, passenger cancellations and contribute to fleet utilization and driver earnings through the automated management of bookings.
This is only the very beginning of what iCabbi’s Google integration will deliver. It’s a new chapter for taxi technology innovation. The iCabbi R&D team, now at 100+ people, is moving forward at pace.