How to showcase GPS tracking as a benefit to your drivers

Installing a fleet GPS tracking system represents a significant investment — and a significant change — for most organizations. Drivers may be wary of the potential impact this in-vehicle technology could have on their job and their privacy. It’s up to you to make sure drivers and staff understand that GPS tracking is a positive change. As an added bonus, it can make fleet operations easier and more profitable, which benefits everyone in the company. 

The benefits of GPS driver tracking for your fleet

With GPS tracking, your fleet can improve routing, streamline productivity and promote safety. Specifically, the technology can help you:

• Get a near real-time, 360-degree view of daily operations 
• Leverage high-resolution maps for powerful tracking that results in:
  • Reduced fuel consumption
  • More accurate ETAs
  • Monitoring of vehicle diagnostics and vehicle maintenance needs
  • Reduction of unauthorized out-of-area vehicle use 
  • The ability to see important trends by team, department or across the entire fleet

The key to getting more out of your GPS driver tracking investment, however, is winning over drivers.

Getting your team on board with GPS driver tracking

To get more out of vehicle GPS tracking systems, your fleet drivers need to be behind it. Here are five ways you can help make drivers more comfortable with GPS driver tracking:

1. Be honest. Tell drivers why you’ve decided to install GPS driver tracking on your fleet vehicles. Help them to willingly support the technology by providing an overview of how technology works and involving them in the implementation.
2. Communicate how it makes driving easier. Let your drivers know how GPS tracking can help make their jobs easier by underscoring how it reduces the need for manual paperwork and streamlines reporting.
3. Showcase how it helps to make driving safer. Help drivers adopt a positive attitude toward GPS tracking by highlighting the ways it promotes their safety, like protecting them in remote areas, expediting emergency response via GPS location data, supporting stolen vehicle recovery.
4. Highlight how it improves the bottom line. Show drivers how GPS tracking helps you prevent unauthorized trips and keep things running on schedule. It can also potentially help improve customer service and increase profitability.
5. Reward them for good performance. Help drivers embrace the new system by emphasizing its positive aspects and rewarding them for excelling at it. Use GPS tracking data as a training tool and set up an awards process for those who follow policies.

Visit the Workforce Optimization for your Connected Fleet report to learn more about how your business can get more out of your workforce using technology.

GPS tracking in action

Papalia Home Services has provided plumbing, heating, cooling and drain-cleaning services throughout Massachusetts since 1989. To help maintain superior customer service, Papalia implemented Verizon Connect GPS fleet tracking on 13 vehicles to better monitor technicians, helping to keep them honest and efficient. The implementation benefited customers, the company and employees with reduced time between routes, more-accurate reporting of time spent on the job site, notifications of excessive speeds or visits to unauthorized points of interest, and up-to-date mapping that helped techs locate addresses. 

Vicki Laake, Office Manager at Papalia, explains, “We are able to zoom in if [drivers] are lost to help them find the customer’s home faster. It also helps us schedule jobs in a manner that keeps the travel time between jobs to a minimum.” 

Papalia’s employees were initially suspicious of having a GPS fleet tracking device in their trucks. “They felt like Big Brother’s watching,” Laake says. “But we’ve had it so long that I don’t think anyone thinks twice about it — unless they are lost or I get an alert that they are speeding in the company truck.”

The system has proven to protect Papalia against false accusations, too. “We had a random person call in to say one of our trucks did a hit-and-run. I immediately ran a report and found we did not have any trucks in that area during the time of the ‘accident,’ and the caller hung up.”