Enabling Urban Passenger Drivers to Provide an Integrated Service

We are a very new company on the market and now are trying to grow. We face some problems that are interfering with our development need. One of these problems that concerns us a lot is related to the drivers and being a major one we addressed it within this project. The problem is that our drivers that do not know how to communicate with the clients, they are beginners and nonprofessional drivers, unprepared when it comes to dealing with various types of contexts. These problems had impact also on the drivers - feeling isolated in their experience; they feel unlucky (e.g. when a passenger doesn’t pay for the ride), think that they are bad at the job (e.g. when unpleasant moments appear, passengers don’t tip or give bad ratings because the service was bad), or even affected by the numerous difficult scenarios they can be exposed to during a single day in a busy big city. These problems have also an impact on the TCD service quality in long term. Given the complexity and dimension of the problem, TCD do not have the resources to address it and Erasmus program is considered to be a solution. Moreover, the cooperation with the partner – experienced institute in training – had an impact on TCD capacity to develop projects.

We are a small company created 4 years ago. We provide ride-sharing transportation for passengers in urban areas, working with non-professional drivers as our employees. Very soon we realised that working in this field we faced a lot of challenges: legislation (not “friendly” for small enterprises), understanding passenger behaviour is vital, lack of teamwork skills of the non-professional drivers. Based on the problem identified through the focus-groups in our organisation with drivers and with other companies acting in ride-sharing transportation for passengers in urban areas, we set as objectives: 1. improving our drivers communication skills, 2. increasing quality of our services and 3. developing our cooperation capacity at European level through creation of a network of ride-sharing transportation companies. In order to achieve these objectives, we proposed and implemented very concrete activities. Main activities reffered to analyse the complexity of the ride-sharing transportation phenomenon, training communication package for our drivers in digital format.

We implemented 5 activities: 1. Research - a study of the target group (quantitatively and qualitatively) through a set of questionnaires and in-depth interviews, was developed as the base for training and the digital guide content. 2. Training - training materials based on partners’ expertise and research findings. Training sessions: Communication Skills 1, Communication Skills 2, Personal Branding, Self Defense, First Aid, Mental and Physical Health, Multicultural Differences and Diversity. 3. Digital Guide - a website, accessible via mobile, desktop, and tablet, with comprehensive information, easy to read, and summary of all the knowledge produced in this project. 4. Visibility, Promotion, Dissemination – project's visual identity (logo and minimal branding), a basic website (to post project roadmap and updates) and profiles on main social media platforms (updates, news, etc): Facebook and Instagram. 5. Project management was implemented over the project period of 18 months through close cooperation between partners and also at the project management teams. The main target of the management activity was to ensure the project activities development within the Erasmus+ regulations, general project timeline and budget.

The concrete outputs are: - report that contains data on research results (200 questionnaire respondents and 10 interviews), easily understandable by the partner organisation and which was used to fully customise the training materials and the final digital guide - 200.000 Facebook users from EU countries and our digital guide gained about 550.000 displays in Google search results (through our paid google search ads campaign). - one communication/soft skill training package: 7 two-hour training sessions and 10 participants - a digital guide personalised for the drivers, that could also be used by other interested parties (e.g. transportation industry professionals). Thus, the guide represents a digital learning opportunity for all citizens and generations, as the drivers are a very diverse segment (i.e. education, age, socio-economic status, technology affinity, etc). The guide is under the form of a website, accessible via mobile, desktop, and tablet. - Partnership between 2 different organization: o In the first phase between TCD Transport (coordinator) and Institut Prvi korak o In the last phase between TCD Transport (coordinator) and Partus Plus