What you can do to improve the risk of your fleet
Whether you manage a fleet of 5 or 500 vehicles, your business can reap the rewards of implementing a strategy to manage the safety and risk of your drivers. Effective risk management of your fleet can both impact your bottom line to increase profitability and help keep your drivers safe while they’re at work.
In this article, we’ll look at several ways you can improve the risk of your fleet, so you can improve your efficiency and minimise avoidable costs.
Know your drivers
When you’re looking to improve the safety and efficiency of your fleet, one of the first places around which you can shape your strategy is how you onboard new drivers. Before you onboard drivers, it’s important to keep in mind whether you’re happy to employ any driver, regardless of their driving history, or if you want to put limits in place on previous claims or licence points. It’s worth noting that driving history has a significant impact on insurance premiums.
For each new driver, you should check their identity and address, their licence details and claims history. By implementing proper screening checks on driver backgrounds and driving history, you can ensure that you are employing drivers of a high standard on a consistent basis.
Screening checks enable you to build up a risk profile for each and every driver in your fleet, which helps improve your overall safety. In turn, this can contribute to a reduction in the number of incidents your drivers are involved in, which can help bring down your premium over time.
Attract and retain the best drivers
Finding new drivers can be difficult and costly. So once you have attracted the best drivers to your company, it’s important to retain their services. You should see your best drivers as an asset to your business, and encouraging driver loyalty is a great way to ensure that they continue to drive for your fleet.
It’s about finding ways to talk to drivers, perhaps helping them to understand how they could drive better and save on fuel. You could even go further and offer a monthly prize draw to reward the best drivers; try different things to see what works for your drivers to encourage their loyalty.
Choose a telematics option that works for you
Telematics solutions are devices, such as black boxes or cameras, which are installed in your vehicles to measure how they are being driven. They can capture risk factors such as whether a driver is consistently driving long shifts, breaking the speed limit often or driving erratically with lots of fast breaking and accelerating.
The telematics option that you choose is an integral part of your risk management strategy, and choosing a solution that works for you can help you to stay on top of your risk. You should approach your decision with a clear picture of which insights are important so that you can better understand your drivers.
Every fleet is different. If you already have a problem with vehicle theft, you may wish to consider a more discrete tracker. Fleets of electric vehicles should think about choosing a telematics partner who offers specialist insights. Base your decision upon your individual circumstances to get a solution that works for you.
Get the most out of your telematics
A lot of fleet managers don’t realise the full potential of installing telematics systems in their vehicles. By investing the time in embedding telematics systems into your daily operations, you can harness their full potential and gain valuable insights into your risk.
Take the time to set up dashboards, reports and automated alerts to help you stay on top of your fleet. It’s always worth opening up conversations with telematics partners to see how they can help you gain even more in-depth analysis and insights into your drivers.
Share insights with your drivers
It’s great to have insights into how your drivers are behaving on the road and to enhance your risk profile for them, but sharing feedback with your drivers can help you manage your risk even better. Insights on how a driver could improve their safety can only add value when they are shared with the driver too.
There is a correlation between unsafe driving and fuel efficiency. Many telematics solutions calculate how much drivers could be saving on fuel. Passing these insights onto your drivers can help them save money and improve the safety of their driving.
Keep improving
Effective risk management isn’t a box that you can tick off and complete, nor is it something to consider once a year when you renew your insurance premium. It requires regular attention to review insights, come up with new ideas and test them out.
At Zego, we understand that every fleet is different. That’s why we provide fleet insurance solutions that are as unique as your business. For more information about how we help you understand and manage the risks associated with your fleet and drivers, you can visit our Fleet insurance page.