The Fleet Customer Experience Revolution

By Jeofrey Bean

A customer’s experience with your company usually begins well before there is a transaction. Leverage this as you prepare the customer experience that is directly with your company. And influence the influencers of your customers such as reviewers, social media readers, writers, and advocates. By doing this purposely you use to your advantage the increasing amount of time potential customers are putting into accessing decision making information before there is a transaction.

You’ll have a big advantage over the majority of companies waiting for a transaction before engaging customers.

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By Janice Sutton

Phil Moser, Vice President at Advanced Driver Training Services (ADTS), is an expert in vehicle crash reconstruction. He says, “When I reconstruct a crash, I will break it down into quarter second intervals. I have proven time and again where, if people could have a quarter second of time back, the crash would never have happened. They would have gone home. A quarter second. How many seconds do we lose being distracted? What occurs in split seconds may not be recovered in a lifetime for the people that are left behind.”

We interviewed Phil at the recent AFLA Conference and were eager to hear how ADTS trains drivers to make the right decisions during those quarter seconds.

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As in September, a large proportion of higher priced, late-model manufacturer off-rental program vehicles, some of which were sold after delays due to recalls, biased average wholesale prices upward and masked the inherent softness of a wholesale used vehicle market facing high incoming supply. Retail used vehicle demand did not provide quite the support to auction prices it had in previous months, as franchised dealers did well simply to retail the many units they have been taking from off-lease purchases and in trade on strong new vehicle sales.

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Anyone who believes battery-electric or hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles don’t have a future greatly underestimates the bullheadedness of Californians. This special breed of American lives in a state wracked by drought, choked with traffic, and bisected by a fault zone. Yet Californians think there’s no better place to be.

For further proof of Californians’ obstinate nature, note that the small but growing market for zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) there has been 24 years in the making. After spinning its wheels in the GM EV1 era, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which regulates state air quality, has finally found the traction to effect a major automotive and cultural shift with its ZEV mandate.

The question is, which one of these technologies (battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) or hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) will win in the long run?

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The world’s automakers have a message for customers: where you drive and how you drive is your business, not ours.

Cars are rapidly transforming into smartphones on wheels, sending enormous amounts of data to manufacturers over connected-car services such as General Motors’ OnStar or through built-in 4G data connections.

Hoping to harness this data to offer more services without eliciting an outcry over the misuse of personal information, BMW, Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, Mitsubishi and Mazda today agreed to industry-wide principles to handle consumer data and safeguard customer privacy.

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Gasoline prices having dropped below $3 a gallon nationally, the future of automobile efficiency programs should be considered critically. For those of tender years, we have been here before: the price drop after 1986 saw the rise of minivans and SUVs, which meant that fuel efficiency for the fleet stabilized after a decade of declines.

Price is the best motivator of efficiency, and despite all the breast beating about advertising and consumer brainwashing, they essentially respond rationally: prices rise, people choose higher fuel efficiency, prices fall, people de-emphasize it.

This is not addiction, its economics.

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Compact crossovers like the Honda CR-V and Ford Escape have long been popular sedan substitutes for small or growing families. And now, at last, there’s a new crop of even smaller crossovers on the way.

Led by the Buick Encore, and soon to include the closely related Chevrolet Trax, as well as the Honda HR-V and Mazda CX-3 (and potentially also already including the MINI Cooper Countryman and Subaru XV Crosstrek), this segment of the market is staged for rapid growth—by empty-nester couples, small families, and even those who just want a little extra space in their small commuter car.

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The winter weather has arrived for several states around the country, which means dangerous driving conditions for fleets. It can be a challenge to ensure both driver and public safety during this time of the year. Fleet tracking software, like GPS Insight, will keep your fleet safe during the icy and hazardous season.

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Leading global payments business, Barclaycard, is to be the headline sponsor of next year’s Fleet World Fleet Show at Silverstone, England on May 12.

The sponsorship follows the successful launch of Barclaycard Fuel+, in association with The Miles Consultancy (Fuel+) at the Fleet World Fleet Show earlier this year. Fuel+ is a new fuel and mileage expenses solution designed to help companies cut their business fuel costs by, on average, 25%. Fuel+ allows drivers to refuel at almost all petrol forecourts in the UK including supermarkets. TMC’s multi-award-winning Mileage Audit system is built seamlessly into the product.

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PepsiCo has kept 55,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by reducing fuel consumption in its transportation fleet by 24 percent since 2010, and is looking to further reduce fuel consumption for its trucks and vehicles, according to Green Century Capital Management, which has been in discussions with Pepsi about its climate change efforts.

In addition, Green Century says Pepsi has outlined several new initiatives to reduce the carbon intensity of its trucking fleet, which involve working with suppliers to seek lower carbon fuel alternatives.

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