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9 Secrets to Reducing your Fleet Expenses
As a fleet owner, your day-to-day costs can quickly add up. What you don’t know is there are further hidden, expensive...
Read moreWaste and inefficiency can quickly add up across any fleet. But if you’re running a small operation, just one inefficient vehicle can impact profitability before you know it.
Increasing numbers of fleet-reliant businesses are turning to GPS technology to spot these problem areas and enhance productivity wherever possible – and many are seeing success. Of the 75% of UK fleets with a solution in place, 63% reduced fuel consumption and 15% lowered labour costs.
And there’s more good news for small fleet operators. GPS technology not only helps save money, but it can also help increase revenues, boost safety and make your customers happy. Here’s how.
Make the most of every mile
The first step in maximising the return on your GPS technology investment is to make sure your drivers, field staff and vehicles are as efficient as possible. This means coaching them on behaviours that can dent your bottom line, such as speeding, idling and sharp acceleration.
With a fleet management solution, you can monitor instances of these events to coach drivers into more economical habits, potentially lowering fuel costs and helping to create a safe work environment at the same time.
You can help technicians to work more efficiently with automation, too. The data collected by your system can generate reports and digitise processes like timesheets, payroll and other compliance obligations. As well as saving time, this approach improves accuracy and reduces the chance of human error.
Automated scheduling can also help your vehicles work harder. With intelligent routing algorithms plotting each day’s routes, you can reduce unnecessary mileage and potentially fit more jobs into the working day.
59% of UK fleets improved productivity and vehicle utilisation with GPS tracking.
Keep your vehicles working for you
Vehicle downtime is always costly. But when just one vehicle accounts for a large percentage of your operation, it can have a devastating impact on profitability.
With a comprehensive GPS solution, you can get greater peace of mind that your vehicles are performing as they should be.
By collating data on unsafe driving behaviours such as speeding and late braking, your fleet management system can produce a driver safety score. The higher the score, the safer the driver. This information can be used to incentivise safe driving and potentially reduce the risk of costly accidents.
Another aspect of the solution, geofences, can help you be sure that your vehicles are where they should be and are only used for business purposes. By placing a virtual perimeter around a physical location, you’ll receive notifications whenever a vehicle is removed from an unauthorised route or area.
You can also set maintenance alerts based on time, mileage or engine hours to keep on top of all routine servicing, repairs and part replacement.
22% of UK fleets improved vehicle maintenance with GPS tracking and 42% saw a decrease in accidents.
Delight your customers
Keeping a customer will always cost considerably less than finding a new one. And at smaller businesses, where budgets can be tight, customer retention is integral to continued success.
Fleet tracking can help to improve customer satisfaction in several ways. With access to near real-time data on location, vehicle and job status and more, you can respond to customer queries in seconds, rerouting drivers as required in just a few clicks.
Location, status and traffic information can also be used to mitigate potential delays and keep customers informed with accurate ETAs. Many fleets share this data with customers so they can track drivers from the depot to the door.
Fleet tracking technology can also help build trust with customers and drivers in the event of an issue or complaint. Fleet managers can use the live map and route replay features to show that drivers are where they should be and what time they arrived, departed and spent at job sites.
70% of UK fleets improved customer service with GPS fleet tracking.
Delivering big results for smaller fleets
With fewer resources at your disposal, the margin for error can be incredibly small. Just one unproductive route, inefficient driver or underperforming vehicle can jeopardise the profitability of your entire operation.
When you implement a GPS solution, you can increase the visibility of your fleet to spot and overcome areas of inefficiency before they become a much larger problem. At the same time, intelligent routing, live maps and in-context coaching can help you improve your service and potentially increase revenues.
Visit our fleet tracking page to learn more about the Verizon Connect solution, or book a free demo to see it in action.
