Taxi Business Tips: Know Who Your Customers Are

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An important step in promoting a taxi business is finding out everything about the best customers of your taxi service. Most taxi business owners have no clue about who their customers are. When asked, a typical answer is “everybody”.

If I were to go deeper and ask who are the best clients, if there are more one than the other, I’d hit the nerve. However, if an analysis were to be performed, a pattern would have become visible. Why is it important?

Suppose an analysis would show that 30% of the customers, who turn out to be the best customers (because they are bringing 60% of company profits), are married couples who use the taxi to go to the airports. Having this information, the taxi business owner would need to gather some more data.

Remember, we are talking about the taxi business and it means that for every passenger we have a phone number and an address. Is there a pattern in the location of these 30% of the customers? Do they live close to each other or are they spread evenly around the town? Can any conclusions be made about their occupations, habits, interests, hobbies, levels of income?

What actions can be taken after all the above questions get answered? Well, there are several important tweak you can make as to how you should be marketing your taxi business now. First, instead of spending 100% or the ad dollars in general media, at least one third should go where one third of the clients are coming from. Second, all the generic ads can get a tweak to address this specific group of customers. Third, surveys can be conducted to try to figure out and address the need of this specific group. For example, is there a need for minivans? Do these customers have kids, would they like to have child seats available on request? If the taxi company added a premium service that offers unmarked luxury sedans, would these customers use such kind of a service? Etc., etc, etc.

At bare minimum, let this article make you think more about your customers and the market you are serving. Too many taxi business owners get stuck in the routine of everyday taxi business operations rather than thinking about who is likely to be most eager and reachable customer they’ll enjoy doing business with and make a nice profit out of it.

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