Bring Your Business Back to Life: Getting Different Roles to Utilise the Same Software

It’s natural that every role in a fleet business has different needs and wants, and every employee has a different style of working. But sometimes, there is a greater good to be had when everyone uses the same strategy.

There is something to be said for rallying the team around using a tool like fleet management software for all different parts of the business – and while getting the business to survive and thrive is the ultimate goal, there are other positive, tangible effects that each employee can experience for himself or herself.

For example, a small business owner using fleet management solutions will have greater visibility about all goings-on in the business, even without being present at every jobsite (because that’s pretty much not possible). Detailed, easy-to-read reports that software can whip up in seconds give an owner the knowledge to better control things like operating costs, making the business more financially stable and helping to better allocate the budget. 

Fleet managers are often juggling several duties at once – maintenance, compliance, safety, efficiency – and GPS vehicle tracking can help streamline operations by keeping track of all the information this involves. There’s no need to keep all this data in someone’s head or buried in stacks of files – a few clicks of the mouse can bring up info like what trucks need oil changes and which drivers have been running late to jobsites. 

Operations leaders also have a lot of information to keep track of in order to improve the company’s performance and reduce costs – and sometimes there are problems buried beneath the surface that make it hard to optimise efficiency. Fleet management software uses technology to parse out the details of the business, giving ops leaders the data to back up their decisions on how to solve problems and what practices can bring more efficiency to the business. 

Service managers pride themselves on getting jobs done right the first time, resulting in customer satisfaction, but to achieve that, they need to be able to set and maintain customer expectations by providing them with accurate information while on the job. Access to near real-time data empowers service managers to make better day-to-day decisions, and the ability to pull up information about every job – even from the field, on a mobile app – means any dispute between customers and techs, or any problem raised by leadership, is able to be handled factually – based on data, not guesswork. 

Dispatchers have a big part in the customer service aspect of the business – their voice is the first one a customer hears, and they are often the ones giving updates on when an employee is expected to arrive at a job. Fleet software gives a tracking dashboard view of where each and every driver is, meaning the dispatcher can quote an up-to-the minute-correct arrival time to the waiting customer. And with the software’s automation capabilities, parts of the job that used to be an annoyance – such as invoices – can be handled with a few clicks of a mouse.