Radio Taxis Limited (RTL)

Radio Taxis Picks Up Capscan

Radio Taxis Limited (RTL) was formed in 1953 by a group of six independent Licensed Taxi drivers. Today, a Co-operative of black taxi drivers own the company, with a fleet of over 2,500 licensed taxis and employing some 200 staff. The company specialises in providing transportation services to many of London's large businesses.

RTL was the first licensed black taxi firm in London to integrate Global Positioning System (GPS) technology into it's despatch system. The GPS ensures the closest available taxi is despatched to the pickup address given by the customer, reducing waiting time and dramatically improving the service. Jonathan Visser, Project Manager at Radio Taxis comments, "RTL has always been committed to maintaining the highest possible service for all of its corporate and personal clients, as well as its drivers, and it was for this reason that we integrated GPS technology into the despatch system."

As part of this commitment, RTL has also recently initiated an Internet Booker project to further improve the service it offers. This innovation was partly due to client demand, but reflects the company's emphasis on customer service. The Internet Booking system is expected to take 25% of the company's business online.

Visser comments, "The correct address data will be needed by the new Internet Booking system so that the taxi despatch system is able to assign the correct GPS co-ordinates to the nominated pickup point. Without a mechanism to validate the customer's data online, the booking system could not work. The correct address details are key to its success."

RTL at first considered building an address validation system internally, using the existing data owned by the company. However, they soon ruled this out as it became clear that to be effective, the software would require a sophisticated search algorithm. They realised that this would have increased the project schedule and wasted much-needed resources.

In the end, RTL turned to a third party resource to provide the solution they needed. Visser explains, "I was impressed with Capscan, they were interested in what we wanted to do and quickly arranged a face-to-face meeting to answer all our questions, and demonstrate their solution to us. The demonstration on the Capscan website quickly and easily established that the basic requirements we had could be met."

After much consideration, they chose the Matchcode Webnet address management software solution provided by Capscan. Visser adds, "We soon realised that building our own solution from scratch would probably not have resulted in a system as robust or complete as that offered by Capscan."

Matchcode Webnet was specially developed by Capscan to provide an address management and data-capture solution for websites. Visitors to a website using Matchcode Webnet simply need to enter a postcode or partial address to return a full and valid address, which can then be used to register as a customer, as a delivery address for goods or as a pick up point for a taxi.

The Matchcode Webnet address management and data-capture software gives RTL's Internet Booker a fast and effective address validation system. It automatically chooses the best search method - quick browsing, rapid addressing, or cross-matching - based upon the details entered by the customer. It compares all addresses against the 27 million records in the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF), ensuring they are all as up-to-date and accurate as possible. Even abbreviations, mis-spellings and incomplete addresses can be identified by Matchcode thanks to its unique "fuzzy matching" processes, so that even from a partial address or postcode Matchcode can return a full and correct address.

The Software Developers Kit provided by Capscan also played a large part in influencing RTL's decision to use Capscan's Matchcode Webnet solution. Visser explains, "Capscan's Software Development Kit included demonstration code in VB and Java - which meant we could test the basic principles out quickly and see how to implement the solution in Java, the language used to create our Internet Booker. The Software Development Kit also included full documentation, presented in an easy to use format, which made life much easier for our developers.
RTL specifically required the ability to add datasets to the Royal Mail PAF address database and Matchcode allows RTL to do this. The extra datasets gives RTL access to the X and Y grid coordinates for a particular address, which it needs to convert the pick-up address into GPS co-ordinates.

Visser continues, "There were a few initial problems, partly due to our developer's inexperience with installing software on a Unix platform, and partly due to the learning curve required to understand Capscan's approach to address searching using the Matchcode product. However all the problems were resolved swiftly through Capscan's support line, so this is now second nature."

RTL are still in the initial stages of rollout with the Internet Booker. Currently, it is used by eighteen of the company's major clients as well as a handful of personal users. Over the next few months, RTL plan to roll-out the project across all of its clients. Capscan's software has worked so well as part of the Internet Booking system, it is now part of a wider strategy to web-enable our despatch and administration systems.

Visser comments, "Our goal is for 25% of taxis to be booked online. Roughly, one in ten taxis are booked for a new address - so the expected 'hit' rate on the Matchcode system is between 15,000 - 22,000 address queries per year".

For the future, RTL are now looking at adding a telephone number dataset to Matchcode Webnet. This will allow customers to validate addresses from their mobile phones using a location's telephone number. This functionality will be used for SMS and WAP versions of the Internet Booker.