#LockdownLessons: Zeelo makes travel safer for essential workers

From a business perspective, we kept our customers informed about the suspension and/or cancellation of certain services due to the lockdown. We also focused on identifying opportunities for Zeelo to be able to assist and continue to operate during the lockdown period and immediately started putting these plans into action.

What's the biggest challenge you are facing during this pandemic?Uncertainty is one of the biggest challenges we are facing during this time, as no one is sure how long the pandemic will go on for and how great the impact will be. This makes it difficult to plan long term and prepare our business for when things return to ‘normal’.The services we are providing during the lockdown period are also presenting their own challenges, as we are working with different markets in different areas than we are used to. As a result, we have learnt to adapt quickly to these changes and to the regulations which need to be followed.

For example, certain essential businesses asked Zeelo to provide services within areas governed by various taxi associations. Initially, this was a challenge for us as we knew we couldn’t compete with the taxi services in these parts, however, we soon came up with a solution to work with the taxi associations and utilize their vehicles and drivers for these jobs, which resulted in a win-win situation for both parties.

What sort of assistance will you need going forward?

We will need continued support from the team we work alongside in the UK and the investors who have helped to guide the business through this difficult time. Any support from the government for SMEs will go a long way in helping businesses see out this lockdown period and ensure they are still around when the pandemic comes to an end.

If you are able to operate, what steps are you taking to continue operating?

Firstly, we obtained a permit to be able to offer transport services for essential workers, from the Companies & Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC).

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Zeelo launches critical-worker commute offering, to help essential service providers beat Coronavirus The safe movement of staff has never been so important and with public transport services closing down and causing a risk to employees wellbeing we have decided to dramatically improve our service standards to be able to support the healthcare food, utility or critical logistics industry. Zeelo is working with a number of businesses around the UK and SA to help ensure employees are still able to get to and from work safely during this stressful time. If you work or know someone in the healthcare, food, utility or critical logistics industry feel free to get in contact with us.

A post shared by Zeelo SA (@gozeelo_sa) on Mar 30, 2020 at 6:05am PDT

Employees have been asked to work from home and abide by the lockdown regulations. Flexible working hours are in place to assist with this, as it can be difficult to balance personal commitments at home with work, especially for those with children.

Are you communicating with your customers? If so, how?

Yes. We are active across our social media platforms and have created Covid-19 specific webpages, banners and pop-ups on our site to keep customers informed. Where services have been disrupted, we communicated with customers via email or over the phone, and our 24-hour customer care centre has remained open to answer any questions via live chat on the website or over the phone.

What do you predict the next 6 months will be like?

At this point in time, it is very difficult to predict what the next six months will look like, as a lot will depend on the government’s plans and the measures put in place to combat the pandemic. We don’t believe this will all blow over in the next six months, but rather we will have found the most effective ways to deal with the pandemic, with the least possible impact on the economy and our daily lives.

We feel that a wider range of industries should be given permission to go back to work towards the end of the lockdown period. This will allow us to get the economy back up and running and allow people to provide for their families once again. At the same time, we feel that the vulnerable people within the population should still be protected and social distancing should still be observed.

As a business, we feel that more and more companies will place emphasis on the well-being of their employees and put measures in place to ensure the health and safety of all of their staff. We are expecting a lot of these companies to reach out to us to provide a dedicated staff transport service for this reason.

Now is the time to innovate and experiment. What is Zeelo doing?

As a tech company, we are programmed to be nimble and adapt to the ever-changing environment around us. During this time, we have experimented with offerings that are outside of the services we usually provide. In doing so, we have identified ways in which our technology can be applied differently in different situations or adapted to fulfil different needs.