Mowasalat has officially launched its Karwa Taxi Application through which the public transport company aims to significantly improve the availability of taxi services across Qatar.

"Customers can download the new Karwa Taxi App on their smartphones and avail of the taxi services in the fastest possible time," Mowasalat CEO Khalid Nasser al-Hail said yesterday.

Besides Karwa's own taxis, the customer could also book taxis of the other four franchisees, namely Al Million, Al Ijaara, Cars Taxis of Profit Trading & Contracting Company and Capital Taxis of Ibn Ajayan Group through the Karwa Taxi App.

Karwa Solutions head Waseem Ahmed and Limo and Taxi Services head Abhijit Mukherji said their teams have been working on a trial basis for about three months and they have received "remarkably encouraging responses" from the customers.

"The new Application benefits customers by improving the availability of taxis, quality of the service as the software has provisions for even reading the fares charged for each journey" said Mukherji while elaborating on the whole project.

Anyone with a smartphone could download the App and avail of the services based on his requirement. The officials recalled that when they started working on the project, the waiting time for taxis was anywhere between three and six hours in peak hours but now it is reduced to 15 minutes.

"Now, efforts are on to reduce the waiting time further to 10 minutes," said the official while informing that there has been an improvement of approximately 600% in waiting time.

While using the application, the customer would also be able to locate the available taxis within the area from where he is searching.

When the project team began testing the App with their regular customers, mainly institutions including hotels,and similar establishments, they had 20,000 calls from customers a month. However the number shot up to 27,000 in a month and now the number of calls is around 45,000/month.

The company has also identified 11,331 active taxi users, said the official. One of the biggest advantages of the application, said Mukherji, is the formation of a single call centre for all five taxi companies operating in the market. "Also taxi will reach a customer from the shortest distance where it is available," he said. The new unified call centre number is 8008294 (800 - TAXI).

Ahmed said with the application working in full swing there has been a remarkable fall in the number of complaints received at the call centre from the customers over the last one month.

"Only 0.1% of the customers have lodged complaints with the call centre, from among 10,000 customers who availed of the services," he said. Internationally, the complaints received at call centres is 0.50%, he added.

Similarly, there has been a significant rise in the revenues generated by the drivers, as per the studies conducted by the call centre, said Ahmed. The company was committed to provide at least a minimum of QR2,000 in earnings to each driver every month. In a month after the project was implemented only 652 drivers could generate revenues of QR2,000 or more. However, now more than 1,200 drivers are earning similar revenues or even more, owing to the new application in place, said Ahmed.

The official also expressed hope that there would be similar rise in the revenues of an enormously large number of drivers in coming months when there is effective utilisation of the App.