When a regular client stops travelling
13. 9. 2026
The lady who travelled to physiotherapy every Thursday has not rung for three weeks. In senior transport that is not an ordinary dip in demand — usually it is illness, a move into care, or the possibility nobody likes to name.
It is not a pleasant subject, but it is part of the work and worth being ready for.
Noticing
The first thing is to notice at all. With thirty passengers a missing name goes unseen; with three hundred, all the more so.
The simplest aid: once a month, look at regular clients whose last ride was more than a month ago. It is not surveillance, it is a list of people you have no news of.
Asking, but carefully
Ringing is usually right. The difference is in how.
What works is plain and unintrusive: "Good morning, this is the village taxi. We haven't seen you for a while, so I'm just checking everything is all right and whether we can do anything." No questioning and no selling.
Sometimes family answers and tells you what happened. Sometimes the client answers and is glad somebody called — for people living alone, you are often one of very few regular contacts.
What not to do: send a text offering a discount, ring repeatedly, ask the neighbours. If nobody answers twice, leave it.
When you learn that a client has died
It happens, and it is worth deciding in advance what to do.
- Cancel the booked rides. Nothing is worse than an automatic reminder about a lift landing on the family.
- Deactivate the customer, do not delete them. Their rides belong in the reports for past months and those must stay intact.
- Send nothing bulk. The contact stays in the list because of the ride history, not for marketing.
- If the family rings, one short honest sentence is enough. Nobody expects a speech.
What to do with the details
Personal data should be kept only as long as it is needed. For assisted transport that means in practice: the name and pass number stay on the rides for settling with the council, but notes about somebody's health and the family's phone number serve no purpose once the service ends — delete them.
A deactivated customer is not offered when booking and gets in nobody's way, while the reports stay correct.
Why write about this
Because this is the difference between a haulier and a service people recommend. Nobody remembers that you arrived on time fifty times. They remember that you rang when it went quiet.
A customer can be unticked as inactive in their detail — they vanish from the picker and the ride history stays.
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