As a business owner in the Pest Control industry, it's not bed bugs that keep you awake at night.
It's the worry about a technician getting involved in an accident while driving to or from a customer site. Or how much fuel is getting wasted in excessive idling. Or if an employee is driving a lot of miles in a company vehicle after hours.
On top of these concerns, per the National Safety Council, an accident will cost your company an average of $24,000 per accident. It is a lot to worry about.
Your technicians simply have to drive better.
Driving towards fleet safety
Fleet Tracking solutions are particularly important in the Pest Control industry as your technicians are continuously in the field in your vehicles. A fleet tracking solution helps your team in optimizing routes to serve your customers better and faster because the dispatch process is more efficient. When employees in the field are supervised more closely, you can better control and even lower your costs.
Other ways in which Fleet tracking solutions prove to be a boon for business owners is they can actually verify if the technician has parked their vehicle in the garage after returning from the field. Such measures eliminate the likelihood of damage or wear and tear on account of vehicle use after hours.
More recently, the discussion has moved to how useful insights can be derived by analyzing vehicle information collected by the tracking device - driver behavior, engine idling, time spent at the job site, and engine diagnostics data. The benefits range from improvements in fleet safety score to a reduction in maintenance costs.
The first priority remains safety. Rich Ennis, CEO of Steritech says, “Immediately upon installation, Azuga’s telematics technology and analytics helped identify and reduce driver risk.”
Multiple benefits from fleet data analytics
Azuga’s driver platform to reinforce good driving behaviors and its customized offering appealed to Terminix Service. “Having educated, engaged and safe technicians operating our vehicles can only be a win for our company. Our insurance company strongly supports the use of telematics devices to aid in the reduction of vehicle accidents. With Azuga Fleet we can now focus on driver safety coaching and recognition using individual driver scores to identify behavior. Parallel to that, we can also manage and service our fleet quickly and efficiently based on proactive alerts such as check engine lights, battery health and scheduled preventative maintenance.” - David Knick, training and technical supervisor for Terminix Service.
Terminix Service selected Azuga’s award-winning fleet tracking program, Azuga Fleet, for its comprehensive GPS tracking functionality; its driver behavior solutions, and engine diagnostic reporting.
Taking your safety score to your fleet insurer
Utilizing Azuga Fleet’s telematics data, pest control businesses can easily identify unsafe driving habits, such as distracted driving and speeding, and give drivers the tools they need to correct these behaviors. Gamification offers rewards linked to performance improvement. In addition, companies are generating reports that demonstrate how their technicians are practicing safe driving behaviors. This allows pest control businesses to speak to their insurance provider about reducing premiums.
“We like Azuga’s approach because the increase in driver competition on safety scores will help our pest control customers to realize safer fleets. It combines driver safety, proactive driver alerts, gamification, score cards and rewards,” - Linda Midyett, director of loss prevention at PestSure, which provides comprehensive insurance coverage for numerous pest control companies.
Higher ROI by applying insights from fleet data
“Many of our pest control fleets have proved that when you take a more driver-centric approach to telematics, improvements begin to happen across the board, driver retention increases and the return on investment becomes effortless. Azuga’s technology is the first to combine rewards-driven telematics with gamification and big data to motivate mobile workers to make smarter, safer driving decisions” - Ananth Rani, co-founder and CEO of Azuga.
Where earlier they focused on efficient routing and basic vehicle tracking, today pest control fleets, large and medium, are looking at more data and more advanced reports.