Best Practices for Special Operations

Owned by Paul Gardner
Last updated: Apr 01, 2020 by Ryan Yowell (Unlicensed)
3 min read

This article discusses best practices and considerations for special operations in times of crisis, reduced service, shutdowns, etc.

Use Ride Reminder

If you’ve got Ride Reminder setup, you can configure a special message in Ride Reminder to send out to the selected riders on a particular day schedule. If you don’t have Ride Reminder, contact us and we’ll add the feature to your Easy Rides and set it up for you at no charge. Calls are billed at 7 cents per minute for each call, and we’ll bill you quarterly. Calls are initiated by your staff, so if you won’t be billed for anything except the calls you make. The system does not use your phone lines, but does display your caller ID on the riders phone when they receive the call.

 

Use the Test Checkbox and enter your own number to hear what the message sounds like first. You many need to type some things out phonetically or reword something to make the text to speech flow better.

Calling ALL Active Clients

Although there is not a user interface for sending out messages to all active clients regardless of whether they have trips or not in your system, we have a workaround for doing so and can help you to do that. It takes a little time to put together and it involves querying your database for phone numbers only (no personal information is needed), but if that’s something you need to do please call or email us and we’ll work with you to get that out for you. It’s not a super fast process, so you’ll need to give us some time to prepare it for you.

Create a new Ride Reminder message

  1. In Easy Rides, go to Tools then Ride Reminder.

  2. Click on Message Setup and add a new message by clicking the add button.

  3. Name the message, designate the call type and language. There is no Save button. When you click out, it will save automatically.

 

Add a Trip Code Reason to track cancellations and suppressed reruns during the change in operation

  1. Go into the Utility and look under Global Options then Configuration then Trip Options and verify the trip code used for Suppressed Reruns.

  2. Add Trip Code Reasons for the “Cancel” and “Suspended” (or the trip code used for suppressed reruns) trip codes so that you can track trips canceled or suppressed because of the circumstances.

  3. Restart Easy Rides and the new Trip Code reasons will be available when you use those trip codes.

 

Managing Reruns

If you’re operating at reduced capacity or if certain programs are not open you may not need some or all of your subscription (rerun) trips on the day schedules. Rather than leaving them on the schedule or marking them as Canceled and have them skew your reporting data, here are some ways to handle those:

  1. Verify you have a Trip Code Reason set up for the Suppressed Rerun trip code.

  2. After configuring the Trip Code reasons, restart Easy Rides if you haven’t already done so after configuring them.

  3. In Easy Rides click on the Trip Ticket menu and click List Reruns.

  4. Click on the reruns that should be suppressed and double click on the calendar days this is to be in effect. If you’re not sure, pick the dates and then re-visit this when they resume showing up on the day schedule.

Use the Save list for another Rerun checkbox to same the same dates to suppress on all of the other reruns. It will significantly shorten the time to go through them all.