What I Hate About Taxis, and What Everyone Hates About Your Business

Just in the past week or so, the ride service UBER won approval to do business in St. Louis, MO USA – my home town. There are a few limitations to what Uber will be able to offer here in the Midwest, but I’m pretty sure this is step one along a path that will see the full Uber business model available to local residents before too long.

I’m not sure that the St. Louis win was monumental to the Uber executive team, although I have no doubt that they cheer every victory, no matter how large or small. But Uber, which started in San Francisco only about five years ago, is now doing business in over 100 cities in 45 countries around the world. Despite a hitch here and there, and push-back from the traditional taxi industry and related (and possibly associated?) government entities, the company is maintaining a steady and notable growth rate. Taxi companies are concerned, and they should be. This summer, in the hometown of Uber, San Francisco cab company owner Chris Hayashi predicted that Uber and associated businesses like Lyft, would put the traditional cab companies out of business within 18 months. The Mayors of Atlanta and New Orleans have expressed similar sentiments.

Now I travel in taxicabs a lot, not only here in St. Louis but when I am elsewhere on business, and I will share with you a few of the reasons why I find taxis so annoying.

First, you never know what you are going to get when you call or hail a cab. I’ve been in some taxis that are so clean you could eat off of their floors (well, not really) but more often than not you find a taxi that looks like something in between a teenager’s messy bedroom and the common room of a badly run homeless shelter. Some drivers have so much stuff in their front seats that I am suspicious that they might actually be living in their cabs. Sonic cups, magazines, religious icons, miscellaneous paper representing who knows what. Even if the back seat is clean, the clutter up front makes me uncomfortable. When I am paying for a personal service, I’d like to see the provider police the area.

Next, taxi drivers seem to have a need to talk. All the time. The drivers who want to talk to me are ok, and I am happy to exchange a pleasantry or two, but I really don’t care to tell you where I am heading, how long I am going to be there, or what the purpose of my trip is. A couple of remarks about the weather or the local sports team makes sense, and I’m pretty good at stopping the chat at that. In a different way, I am disturbed by the drivers who are talking on their telephone the whole time they are driving. I’m pretty sure that Jabra or the other companies who make Bluetooth earpieces have made their fortunes catering to the taxi business. Still I would rather the driver talk to his brother in law than to me – the conversations are often in one of the “any languages but English” I don’t speak after all, so they become background noise rather quickly.

The third thing, and this is really a big gripe of mine, is all of the different ways that taxi drivers try to get around taking your credit card in payment for the ride. Bravo to all of the cab companies who have installed swipe machines in the back seat for easy transactions, and curses on you who fix me with a baleful look, or heave a heavy sigh when I give you my plastic. Hey, I don’t like carrying around large amounts of cash, and with taxi rides routinely costing $20 – $50, I would need a couple hundred just to get through a trip. I should especially mention the need for a new level in hell for the drivers who tell me they don’t take credit cards at all until I say that this is all I have to pay them, so unless they want to sit at the curb – without the meter running – while I hunt down an ATM… Suddenly they find the credit card machine (it was buried under some trash on the front seat!) and we complete our transaction.

Most of these and other complaints are being overcome by Uber, and are a big part of the reason why the model that Uber provides has a great chance of disrupting the taxi business into oblivion. At the heart of it all, I believe, is that they are paying attention to their customers and put the customers’ needs first.

So, now to your business? Whether you interact with consumers (B2C) or with other businesses (B2B), are you paying attention to your customers? Do you put their needs first? Nominally, we all would probably say that we are, but how do we know? Could you compile a list of items that would likely be found under the heading of “Why I hate <your business here>”? I don’t necessarily mean  your specific company, but the industry you are in. Think about this for a minute. Let’s suppose you are NOT in the grocery business. Can you think of what you dislike about going to the grocery store? What about healthcare? What gripes you the most about a trip to the doctor or the emergency room? If you have to deal with a service person for your furnace or roof or sprinkler system, what vexes you about working with these tradesmen? We won’t even get started on the cable guys!

So if it’s relatively easy to fill out a “what I hate about” list for almost every type of business we have to deal with, why should we think that OUR business is exempt? Don’t live in that bubble. Start asking around – not just your customers but also family members, friends, people you meet at the Chamber of Commerce – and find out what people who do business with companies in your line of work dislike most about their experiences. It shouldn’t take you very long to find a litany of things that  you could do to make your actual customers feel more important, feel that their needs are being met, feel that you are actually listening to them and trying your best to make your interaction as pleasant as possible for them.

Or, you can just keep doing things the way you have been, and even act surprised when the “Uber of your industry” comes along and puts you out of business.