As a fleet manager or small business owner, it's likely you have more important priorities than insurance. You have customers you need to think about, you have business plans to manage, and you have costs you need to control.
That said, fleet insurance is a crucial element in achieving all your plans. Insurance helps you keep your fleet moving, it helps you generate revenue, and it helps you keep your commitments to your customers.
What challenges do fleet managers face?
The challenge for many businesses is that insurance, while essential, seems to add little value to the business, beyond keeping your fleet legally on the road.
Buying traditional fleet insurance is rarely a straightforward process. All your records need to be accurate – for your vehicles, for your drivers, and for your accident history.
Adding or removing drivers and vehicles through the year is rarely easy-going. In the back of your mind, there is the thought, ‘is everything adequately covered?’ and ‘have we shared all of the necessary information with our insurer?’.
2. Speaking to your insurer can be tough
Most companies only contact their insurer when renewing their policy. Many only have more contact when making a claim, which again can be a fraught process, whether online or dealing with a call centre.
Processing a claim can be painful, with policyholders often having little visibility of what is happening to their claim unless they spend yet more time chasing up their insurer.
3. It’s hard to be sure you’re covered
Another problem is the type of risk you need insuring. The reality is that your fleet insurer often has little understanding of your business; they only know what your business does and your claims history.
This, together with the history of other companies in your sector, will influence your premium, even if you have a different business model from your peers.
Much of this is because of historical reasons. Long-established insurers have systems and procedures that force customers to work in this way.
Many of their customers even expect to work this way and use brokers to take some pain away, but not all.
What does this mean for fleet managers?
All this means that, for many fleet managers, their relationship with their fleet insurer is strictly one way and very transactional.
Fleet managers and business owners often find all this time-consuming and frustrating. It also runs against the experience that they face every day.
After all, your customers are asking you to be flexible and adaptable and to do more with less. Being a professional, you change and adapt to grow your business, and expect your suppliers to do the same.
How can Usage Based Insurance help fleet managers?
In a day and age where businesses invest in technology and data to create new and better products, systems and processes, surely insurers can do this too?
To an extent, they are. You can buy insurance online, compare prices and raise claims. But all too often, that’s where the flexibility ends – it still comes down to a model that has not changed much in over one hundred years.
We think you can do this differently and better.
Usage Based Insurance (UBI) takes a different approach to insurance.
What is Usage Based Insurance?
Usage Based Insurance uses comprehensive vehicle data to provide more valuable and relevant data that enables an insurer to give you better insurance coverage when you need it most.
For example, you can pay a lower premium per hour when your vehicles are off the road and the insurance risks are at their lowest.
Equally, when a vehicle is on the road for 12 hours a day during the week, you can pay more for the more comprehensive insurance coverage you need when your vehicles are out and about.
It means you can have a better – often cheaper – fleet insurance policy that meets the unique requirements of your business and how you utilise your fleet.
Usage Based Insurance policies use data analytics that help you pay monthly based on the number of vehicles you use and how well your employees drive them.
Usage based policies are easy to manage too, saving you time and money. You can use a portal to access all your insurance history, on all your vehicles and drivers. You can raise claims and follow them through the whole process. Adding and removing drivers and vehicles is quick and easy.
How does Zego calculate Usage Based Insurance fleet policies?
Zego partners with ABAX, a world-class telematics provider, to provide flexible insurance that suits your fleet. Once you have the ABAX device installed in your vehicles you can track how much time your vehicles spend on the road and the distance they cover, ensuring you only pay for the cover you use
A low minimum base rate is applied to your policy for times when your fleet is off the road, so you can rest assured your vehicles are always covered legally.
You’ll also get access to a great range of benefits via our portal, including reports, policy management tools and documentation so you can manage the risk of your fleet and improve your operational efficiency, all in one place.
How can Zego help you?
Zego is the market leader in providing usage based insurance policies to fleet managers and solo drivers in the UK. Over seven years ago, we created the sector to help fleet managers and owners find new ways of insuring some of their most valuable assets. So far, we have insured over 200,000 vehicles, with over seventeen million policies, across Europe.
Learn more about our usage based insurance products.