Managing an entire fleet of vehicles is never going to be an easy task. Not only do you have to worry about unexpected traffic delays, high fuel consumption and keeping vehicles properly maintained, you also need to contend with rising customer expectations and a growing pool of dangerous competitors.
Fortunately, advances in GPS technology are helping businesses remain competitive and improve their service, with modern fleet trackers allowing companies to monitor the position, schedule and route of all their vehicles in real-time. By implementing such useful technology, your fleet management systems will suddenly seem far more straightforward.
So, how exactly can your business benefit from GPS fleet tracking?
Plan Better Routes
Modern GPS trackers offer real-time tracking capabilities, providing extensive information on traffic congestion, speed limits, roadworks and even weather conditions. Such innovative technology helps businesses to plan more effectively, making it easier to create more efficient routes and enhancing the existing logistical processes.
By accurately monitoring the progress of your vehicles, GPS trackers help drivers avoid any unnecessary delays, resulting in improved delivery times and happier customers. Since you’ll know exactly where your drivers are at all times, you’ll be able to dispatch the nearest vehicle to the required destination; allowing you to respond to urgent situations much more effectively.
Additionally, constant monitoring means you’ll be able to see exactly how long it takes staff to fulfil a particular task, giving you better insight as to what’s causing delays and how operations can be improved. When you’ve got access to such information, you can accurately distribute workloads and enhance your entire scheduling process.
In short, GPS tracking helps you make smarter business decisions and improves the overall efficiency of your operation, while simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint and improving the quality of service you’re able to provide.
Reduce Expenses
Since GPS trackers help you create more efficient routes, they’ll also help to lower operational costs and ultimately save your business significant amounts of money. In addition to minimising fuel consumption and reducing the risk of having to pay staff for overtime, installing a GPS tracker can also result in lower insurance premiums and help you recover any lost or stolen vehicles.
Encourage Good Driver Behaviour
The primary purpose of a fleet tracker is to help you keep an eye on your vehicles at all times. By monitoring the speed of vehicles and ensuring they don’t venture off course, you can guarantee that drivers are operating productively, efficiently and, more importantly, safely—with the latest trackers notifying you as soon as someone is deemed to be driving aggressively or recklessly.
While some drivers might be tempted to take a side-trip while out on the job (or to remain idle for an extended period of time), the installation of a GPS tracker will completely eradicate that temptation; instead encouraging consistent good behaviour and bringing a certain sense of professionalism to the operation.
In addition, when you always know where your vehicles are in real-time, you’ll obviously know exactly how to find a driver in case of emergency, allowing you to respond quickly to a call for help and significantly reduce the amount of downtime. Of course, this is also an essential measure towards keeping your staff safe while they’re working out on the road.
Improve Customer Service
GPS fleet tracking allows you to plan efficient routes and enhance communication with drivers, inevitably resulting in faster delivery times and lower costs. From a customer’s point of view, these two things are considered the cornerstone of fantastic customer service.
Real-time tracking allows you to provide customers with more accurate information on their delivery times, updating them with any unexpected delays and ultimately letting them know exactly when to expect the driver. Perhaps more importantly, fleet tracking helps you identify the nearest vehicle to a particular customer, meaning you can respond quickly to any urgent situations and resolve major complaints far more efficiently.
Beat Competitors
Whether you run a food delivery service or a fleet of taxis, the expectation of the modern customer is now higher than it’s ever been before—and it’s continuing to rise. In order to remain competitive, businesses are having to respond to this expectancy with faster, more accurate delivery times and improved customer service.
GPS tracking is proving essential in delivering that service, helping businesses enhance the productivity of their drivers and stay ahead of the competition, offering customers an experience they’re unlikely to find anywhere else. In fact, as the technology continues to evolve, your business will struggle to remain competitive at all without a GPS fleet tracking system installed.
