Who you gonna call?

You’ve left the station, you need a cab, who are you going to call? This lottery of eight choices, seen yesterday in Dinard, north west France, is a poetic demonstration of how lousy customer experience arises out of poor service design.

So (here’s one to ponder for the weekend) what’s the chances of the person needing a taxi getting a driver who’s free with their first call? At busy times – when, by definition, more people want fewer available taxis -they can’t be much better than winning at roulette in the Dinard casino over the road. It could be eight calls and there’s still no guarantee of a car.

Dinard taxi drivers are obviously an independent lot. Some chasm in their thinking or idiosyncrasy of behaviour has created a painful and potentially time-consuming dilemma for potential clients. What’s stopping the drivers clubbing together to have one number, a single base and a rota system?

Is it mutual mistrust? Cost? Lack of demand making it not worthwhile? Or is it just a “sod the customers and make them pay” attitude? And by what stroke of chance or seniority did Michel Loquen come to be at the top of the list? Poor old Luc Tacher, stuck there at the bottom, must be having a hard time of things, or do more people call him on the sensible grounds that he’s most likely to be free?

There’s got to be a better way, so here’s a challenge everybody: best use of creative technology and design to create the ideal low cost, customer-friendly, fair-to-all-drivers contact system for Dinard taxis. Rest assured all helpful suggestions will be passed on to Michel, Didier, Joseph, Philippe, Laurence, Jean-Michel, Allo (?) and Luc. After all, we have their numbers.