Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) companies are adopting vehicle tracking systems for their fleets at a high rate. This technology increases a company’s bottom line by improving the way their mobile workforce is managed.
Vehicle Tracking Systems Improve Customer Service
More efficient dispatching: Having your dispatchers call your techs to find out job status and location just wastes time. With real-time location data from vehicle tracking systems, dispatchers can quickly send the best tech to the next job. This is especially important for emergency calls.
Accurate ETA’s: Your customers do not appreciate 4-hour windows for a technician’s arrival time. Wouldn’t it be nice if your team could supply accurate ETA’s once a driver has been dispatched? You can do this with vehicle tracking systems.
Verifying job completion: Sometimes customers will claim that they were never serviced or question a bill. Having in-depth reporting that verifies whether or not a tech showed up to a job site ensures you receive earned revenue.
Happier customers lead to more revenue and a better public image. Happy customers mean loyal customers and loyal customers talk.
Monitoring Fleet Usage to Reduce Fuel Costs
One of the top concerns for fleet managers is the monthly fuel bill. Vehicle tracking systems will dramatically reduce the numbers you are accustomed to seeing each month.
Reduce speeding and idling: Automated alerts sent to management and drivers as an incident occurs, will reduce both. Idling is usually the #1 factor for an expensive fuel bill.
Eliminate unauthorized usage: Sometimes techs run errands between jobs or possibly work side jobs. Also, sometimes techs are allowed to take their vehicles home. This may mean there is a lot of unauthorized usage of your vehicles that you don’t know about and fuel you are also most likely paying for. Cutting side jobs, out of the way lunches, and trips to the lake on the weekend will reduce your fuel costs.
Improve dispatch: Sending the best or closest vehicle to a job site instead of a tech that is on the other side of town will also reduce your monthly fuel costs.
Analyze routes: For those who don’t use Garmin to ensure techs take the best possible route to a job, they can pull a report to see the route the tech chose and help coach them on what route they should have taken.
Generate fuel card reports: Monitor all fuel card transactions, and more importantly, see flagged activity where a vehicle was not present for the associated purchase. Fuel card reporting also allows for the calculation of MPG data and the easy identification of non-fuel purchases. Monitoring this type of data can lead to identifying fuel card fraud.
Vehicle Tracking Systems Improve Vehicle Maintenance
Simple maintenance scheduling: Many HVAC companies still have a very manual and error-filled maintenance routine, recording odometers and scheduling all maintenance with paper logs. Vehicle tracking systems have an easy to use maintenance module built in so that you can set up all maintenance for your vehicles based on a mileage interval or a set date.
Automated maintenance reminders: Once the schedule is created, your maintenance team and techs can be reminded when maintenance is due. This will undoubtedly extend vehicle life-cycles and prevent costly breakdowns.
Service companies in all industries are implementing vehicle tracking systems to help manage their mobile workforce and assets. Your competitors have started using the technology to boost their bottom lines and be on the leading edge of fleet management, so isn’t it about time you do the same?
Contact us for more information on how your HVAC business will benefit from a vehicle tracking system.
