MetroCab cut wait times 47% in 12 weeks

The starting point

MetroCab is a 240-vehicle taxi cooperative in a mid-size UK city, serving the city center, suburbs, and the regional airport. Founded in 1989, the co-op had run on Autocab for 14 years. By late 2025, complaints were stacking up: phone bookings dropped 22% YoY, customers calling in stayed on hold for 4-7 minutes during peak, and drivers were starting to defect to a local Uber-style competitor.

"Our customers stopped picking up the phone, but they weren't downloading our app either. They were just opening Uber. We knew we were losing them every weekend."

What changed

MetroCab evaluated TaxiDex against three other platforms in early 2026. The decisive factors:

• Trip-based pricing — predictable monthly cost vs Autocab's per-vehicle licenses.
• Modern white-label app — the dispatch director downloaded a competitor's TaxiDex-built app and showed the board.
• 11-day migration commitment — no parallel licensing, no extended downtime.

The migration

TaxiDex's onboarding team mirrored the Autocab data (customers, drivers, zones, fares, 12 months of trip history) over 3 days, then ran both systems in parallel for 6 days. By day 10, all dispatchers were trained; day 11, Autocab was decommissioned at 2am during the lowest-traffic shift.

Critical detail: IVR-to-app conversion was configured day-1. Every customer who called in got a post-booking SMS with the new branded app link. By month 3, 38% of phone-bookers had converted to app users.

The numbers, 90 days later

• Average dispatch time: 7 minutes (Autocab) → 90 seconds (TaxiDex AI auto-dispatch)
• Dead mileage: -23% across the fleet (AI proximity dispatch)
• YoY bookings: +38% (driven by IVR-to-app conversion and faster app load)
• Customer NPS: +42 (from 11 to 53)
• Driver retention: 91% (vs 67% same period prior year)
• Software cost: -36% (trip-based vs per-vehicle Autocab licenses)

"We cut average dispatch time from 7 minutes to under 90 seconds. Our drivers stopped complaining about empty miles in the first month. The dispatch board is the cleanest I've used in 22 years."
— Operations Director, MetroCab

What's next

MetroCab is now piloting TaxiDex's 24/7 outsourced dispatching service for overnight shifts, with a plan to reassign internal dispatchers to corporate-account management and customer recovery work.