When it comes to running a business, customer service is key. In fact, 84% of consumers reported that customer service played a major role in deciding whether or not to buy from a particular company.
Providing quality customer service not only encourages existing customers to continue buying from you — which is cheaper than trying to attract new customers — but it may also create a domino effect. A few word-of-mouth referrals or glowing online reviews from satisfied customers can easily boost your sales.
Not sure how to level up your customer service? A good place to start is to install business vehicle tracking hardware in your fleet. Essentially, a business vehicle tracker allows you to track your fleet in real-time, review each vehicle’s route history, be alerted when important deliveries and pickups are made, and more. With the data provided by your business vehicle tracking software, you’ll be able to better tailor your services to fit your customers’ needs.
Here are five valuable ways business vehicle tracking can step up your customer service game.
Get a Beginners Guide to Business Vehicle Tracking
1. Provide customers with more accurate ETAs
Business vehicle tracking allows you to track your drivers in real-time. Whether you’re working from home or at the office, you’ll be able to see where all your drivers are at any given time. This makes it easy to provide customers with accurate ETAs for deliveries and pickups, thus reducing the waiting and idling on each job. By tracking your drivers in real-time, you’ll know when drivers are late so you can let customers know when changes to the ETA are made.
2. Improve your fleet’s efficiency
In addition to tracking your fleet in real-time, business vehicle tracking also lets you view each vehicle’s route history with exact coordinates. With this data, you can make adjustments to your fleet’s routes and have a better sense of how often your vehicle is on the road. A well-maintained fleet is less likely to break down en route or encounter maintenance-caused accidents.
3. Increase the number of customers your business serves
Another benefit of reviewing the route history of your fleet is that you’ll be able to see when each vehicle leaves your site, arrives to the customer, and returns. With this information, you can optimize the number of projects employees complete each day and ensure they’re assisting the maximum number of customers possible. Well organised fleets mean drivers’ tasks are distributed efficiently and fairly and they are therefore less likely to be overworked. Because your drivers are often interacting directly with customers, happy drivers will make for happy customers.
4. Quickly respond to last-minute jobs
A major perk of business vehicle tracking is that you can see where all your vehicles are at any given time, which allows you to dispatch the nearest vehicles to last-minute or high-priority jobs. You’ll reduce customers’ waiting time and be able to complete these projects in a timely manner. Additionally, this means that one driver can complete more jobs in one day if they are called to the jobs closest to them, rather than having to drive to jobs that are further away.
5. Provide customers with proof of delivery and pickup
Business vehicle tracking devices let you set geofences around specific addresses, and you’ll receive an alert when your vehicles enter and exit that zone. You’ll be able to immediately notify the customer that a pickup or delivery has been made, thus showcasing that you’re going above and beyond with your services. This special geofencing feature can be used for all projects, or it can be reserved for high-priority deliveries and pickups.
Why Invest in Business Vehicle Tracking?
With home deliveries on the rise, it can be difficult to provide customers with the excellent service you’ve always given. Business vehicle tracking is a simple way to improve your customer service and secure loyal customers. Customer retention is key to the long-term growth of your company, and having faithful customers will provide stability to your business during periods of reduced sales.
Ready to take your customer service to the next level? Business vehicle tracking is a step in the right direction.
Get a Beginners Guide to Business Vehicle Tracking
What solutions does our business vehicles tracking provide?
Our business vehicle tracking provides companies with 24/7 driver, vehicle and traffic visibility. We can, in turn, help your business with:
- Preventing vehicle misuse
- Customisable notifications mean you can be alerted when drivers leave the premises outside of business hours
- Access automated records of all past and present fleet activity with time stamps
- Improving customer service
- Find out ETAs for customers, without disturbing your drivers
- Send the closest driver to each appointment, making your fleet operations more efficient
- Our business vehicle tracking deliver to more customers in one day
- Cutting fuel costs
- Send the nearest driver to a job & optimise fleet routes
- Find drivers that are speeding or driving outside of business hours
- Travel fewer miles and use less fuel
- Responding to jobs instantly
- Locate and send the nearest driver to the job’s address
- Respond instantly, get more jobs done in one day with our business vehicle tracking
- Reducing carbon footprint
- Identify vehicle misuse, excessive speeding and route overlaps and only send the nearest drivers to appointments
- Reduce fuel consumption
- Getting a clearer operational overview
- Ensure drivers are where they should be
- Access an automated record of appointments with time stamps and use it as proof of job duration for clients
Could our business vehicle tracking really benefit your business? Download our brochure to find out:
How does our business vehicle tracking affect your bottom line?
Our business vehicle tracking solutions have the potential to:
- Cut your fleet costs by up to 15%
- Increase your productivity by up to 30%
- Save up to 60% of your fleet-related time
You can take a look at our car tracking reviews or, if you would prefer speaking to our team directly about how our business vehicle tracking could help, feel free to get in touch with our team directly:
The security sector: customer service is of “higher importance” due to COVID-19
This October Vimcar conducted a survey, asking hundreds of employees in the security sector to participate. They helped to understand the current relationship between the industry, their customers and fleets.
The security sector has not been immune to recent economic uncertainty. So, when asked about the economic pressures of COVID-19, 85% of respondents said they “now considered customer service to be of a higher importance”.
Off the back of this, Vimcar dug deeper into the dynamic between the sector’s customers and its fleets. It found an untapped potential with regards to the sector’s ability to improve its customer service, easily and cheaply.
The Results
Nearly half of the respondents said that the service they offered customers was entirely dependent on a fully-functioning fleet.
It is not surprising then that 63% of all the firms surveyed think that installing business vehicle tracking would “improve customer service”.
And why business vehicle tracking? For businesses in the security sector, such as those responding to security alerts (or even just installing alarms in customer homes), fleet tracking offers Security Firms transformative fleet solutions.
These solutions include the ability to find the closest driver to a customer appointment, send notifications when the driver has arrived and proof they have arrived – even if the customer themselves are not there.
Out of everything available, participants’ favourite fleet solution was the ability to provide customers with accurate driver ETAs.
However, even though they recognised business vehicle tracking’s potential to improve customer-company relations, nearly 60% of participants said they did not yet have a tracking system in place.
This signifies a clear gap between the number of businesses in the security sector that are aware of the fact that business vehicle tracking would improve their customer service and those who are actually using business vehicle tracking.
It’s important to highlight that this is at a time when customer service is apparently more important than ever.
PDF on Using Fleet Data for Customer Service
Real UK companies using business vehicle tracking
One UK customer that is already using Vimcar’s business vehicle tracking product, Fleet Geo, is Brian Doherty, a Company Director based in Northern Ireland. He found Fleet Geo made a marked difference in their ability to serve customers: “When a customer calls and asks for a delivery, we are able to give them ETAs. We have hundreds of customers and it’s great to be able to see which van is closest to which customer: a real selling point.”
Hannah Wise, another Fleet Geo customer said, “reputation is really important to us and Fleet Geo really helps. Now, when we knock and nobody is home, we can prove to the customer that we were actually there.”
A more recent Vimcar customer is Allun Wright, the Company Founder of Wright’s K9 Security Services. They provide customers with high-threat protection and specially-trained canines. Allun’s fleet transports his precious canine cargo and sends out security personnel in emergency security situations.
Whilst seeing “where [his] fleet is at any given time” has helped improve customer service and internal operations, business vehicle tracking has given them numerous other solutions as well.
Namely, having paid for the fuel and fleet vehicles himself, Allun wanted to put a stop to unpermitted vehicle use. For Allun, security comes first, especially when it comes to the security of his own fleet:
“We were dealing with vehicle misuse within our fleet. That’s now been solved!”, said Allun. “Fleet Geo allowed me to monitor drivers’ speeds and distances: I can see if there have been any discrepancies with employees logging in their working times.”
1 comment
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