Bottom Line Benefit: Landmarks & On-Time Arrival!
FleetBoss helps drivers arrive on-time and keep their jobs on schedule.

Two common quality standards for service companies are "arriving on time, as scheduled" and "doing a complete job." A customer may physically need to be present when a company's truck arrives. For example, a technician may need a customer to provide special access to a building or a piece of equipment. Clients fully expect a service truck to show up when promised.

In the case of regularly-scheduled, "unattended" service visits, such as pest control inspections or pool care treatments, a customer may only know that a representative was supposed to be there at a certain time, but may have no idea when he got there, what he did, or how long he stayed. The customer doesn't necessarily care about these things, either, as long as he perceives that your company did a thorough job and fairly earned its fees.

Ways to meet customers' "on time" appointment expectations
Your FleetBoss system can "ride along" with your technician and report back to you that he kept his appointments. At workday's end, your AutoGraphics Enterprise software provides some effective ways to relate the work "planned to do" to the work actually done.

Follow the tips below to maximize your "customer service quality" payoff:

• Run Productivity Reports for each driver on a daily basis. Review scheduled appointment times and compare them to the actual arrival times recorded for each vehicle. If drivers are habitually late, review company policies with the employees involved or consider revising your dispatching methods to correct the source of the problem.
  
  
• Create a "Landmark" Record in your software for each location your trucks visit regularly. Landmarks are custom labels that represent locations important to your business operations, such as customer sites, branch offices, or perhaps your employees' homes. AutoGraphics software converts the recorded GPS coordinates for each stop to an address and lists it as the Landmark name. Whenever one of your vehicles visits a Landmark, the label displays automatically on reports and maps. You'll have quick access to answers to questions such as:
  

1. How many times did Truck A visit Customer 1 this month? Truck B? How many times did either truck visit customer 2?
2. Did my service truck stop at any address other than customer sites? If non-Landmark addresses appear on a report, are the unknown addresses authorized stops?
3. How often did my service truck arrive on-time at each of the planned stops? Set a fleet goal for on-time arrivals and then spot-check reports.
   

• Assign Service Stop Flags for critical equipment activities and Landmarks, as appropriate. You can then quickly review a Productivity Report for "S" flags that indicate a service stop at Landmark locations. As we discussed last month, Landmark Service Stops help you measure fleet productivity on reports. Customer service managers can answer questions such as:
  

1. Where and when did my equipment run?
2. Did my employee stay at a customers long enough to do the work right? If an inspection is supposed to take an hour, was the truck on site for at least this long? Was the truck on location too long, causing the next customer to wait? Deviations from the daily work plan may detract from your ability to provide excellent service to all your customers. Create "benchmark" times for your service tasks and hold employees accountable for doing the work in the the time allotted, no more and no less.

Become familiar with these simple functions in your software and you can put some tangible quality in your customer service operation.

Defining Service Stops Linked to Landmarks
Defining "Service Stops" linked to Landmarks is an important function that can be performed on the Edit Landmarks display.

Service Stops are shown on Productivity Reports (the "S" symbol) and are used in calculating several Graphs. Service Stops can be any stop where business related work is performed. Service Stops are key indicators of vehicle efficiency and driver productivity.

Your installer will program Service Stop "rules" for your vehicles during initial software setup. The rules are based on Input activations (if you have onboard equipment tied into the mobile unit), or upon minimum and maximum time spent at any given stop.

If your Landmarks consist of customer or job sites, an additional option is to link Service Stops with Landmarks. You can tell the software which Landmarks to count as Service Stops with three options:

• Follow Rules: the default option, only stops falling into the preset rules will count as Service Stops based on time or inputs activated.
• Never: no stops at this location will result in Service Stops (e.g., an employee's home address, the company office)
• Always: each stop at this location counts as a Service Stop (e.g. routine repeat stops along a delivery route).

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