This inaugural blog is the start of a series that focuses on What Fleets Want in 2021 and Beyond. As we approach the final months of 2021, you may be starting to think about your business goals and aspirations for next year. Businesses that fail to understand and meet their customers’ changing needs, choosing to move into 2022 with a passive “business as usual” approach, will struggle to remain relevant and competitive in the industry. Through our own research and the findings of other reputable sources, we’ve identified six key areas that fleet customers are looking for in fleet management solutions:
- Relevance
- Choice
- Integration
- ‘One-stop shop’
- ‘Single-pane-of-glass’
- Engagement & advice
Achieving your goals requires you to help customers achieve theirs
You want to provide your customers with the best services and support, while also prioritizing your business’s own growth goals. You’re probably working toward growing your subscriber base, increasing your customer retention rate, figuring out how to earn more revenue per customer, or increasing profitability.
Your goals are unique to your business, but at the root of your strategy for achieving them, it’s absolutely critical to have a thorough understanding of your customers’ ever-evolving needs. Getting inside the heads of your customers allows you to effectively plan for how you can uniquely address their business challenges and help them grow. By prioritizing customer growth, you prioritize your own.
Fleets today are demanding variety when choosing fleet management solutions. They want choices across multiple solution categories and an ability to pick custom applications that are relevant to their business needs and challenges. We’ll begin this series by first diving deeper into what it means for fleet management solutions to offer choice and relevance to customers.
Fleets want a broad selection of relevant third-party solutions integrated with their fleet management platform
Fleet managers want custom solutions to choose from across multiple relevant categories, and the data proves it:
- 73% of fleet survey participants would prefer to subscribe to a GPS fleet management platform that offers a broad selection of applications from third parties that would be easily integrated with their own GPS fleet management platform (C.J. Driscoll and Associates).
- 69% of SMBs are looking for applications that are relevant and specific to their industry, rather than apps that are “one size fits most” (SMBs and Cloud Service Adoption).
These findings should come as no surprise, given that:
- The fleet industry is made up of different types of fleets with various operating models and sizes. All of these require their own unique flavors of fleet tech solutions. In order to find solutions that are relevant to the business problems they’re facing, fleets expect to see multiple options of solution providers that span multiple categories and verticals.
- Solution saturation results in hours spent researching applications, distracting managers from their actual business priorities. Fleet managers have long experienced the pressures of improving productivity, safety, and compliance, while simultaneously reducing operating costs. There’s an expanse of fleet solutions out there to help address those pain points, but researching and validating them can be overwhelming and time-consuming.
The power of choice among solutions that are relevant to the needs of fleets is essential to identify and harness as you define your business goals. Your ability to streamline discovery efforts for your fleet customers by providing them with an abundance of vetted and relevant solutions across a variety of categories will set you apart from competitors, enable you to attract customers across multiple fleet segments, improve your retention rate, and ultimately boost your growth.
Are you effectively addressing the need for choice and relevance?
Fleet management solution providers often attempt to address customer needs in a couple of ways that aren’t necessarily effective:
- Some take a horizontal approach and offer only one solution in each solution category. While some providers may try to build their own add-ons, or add a handful of white-labeled solutions to their platform, evidence shows there is typically very little adoption of those add-ons among existing customers. The main reason for the limited adoption is, you guessed it…choice and relevance. As already mentioned, customers want to know that they have a choice, and if they are not offered a choice, they will look elsewhere. They also need to find solutions that are relevant to them, and it is very rare that one solution or add-on in a solution category can meet the needs of a significant percentage of your customer base. Another reason that home-grown add-ons see very little adoption is that they are usually not that good. It’s hard to compete with providers of point-solutions that know their solution category in and out.
- Some focus vertically and create highly specialized offerings. This works great for that specific fleet segment. The problem with this approach is that once such specialized providers become established in the market and look for growth opportunities, they lack the breadth of solutions and relevance needed to attract a wider base of varying customers.
Focusing on either of these approaches won’t fully address the issues of choice and relevance for your customers. Rather, finding a blend in which you can provide your customers with multiple highly specialized choices across a comprehensive array of categories will.
A Roadz-powered “Ecosystem in a Box” provides the choice & relevance customers are demanding
Offering an ecosystem of smart fleet solutions can help you address both choice and relevance for your fleet customers, while also giving your company opportunities to:
- Increase customer acquisition
- Improve customer retention
- Increase revenue
If we agree that it is essential to provide fleets with choice and relevance, and that the best way to do that is to offer an ecosystem of solutions across multiple categories, available through a marketplace, then the question becomes: how do you build such an ecosystem?
Building such a marketplace and ecosystem on your own could take several years and millions of dollars. You must also consider the tech and dev resources needed for ongoing management of the marketplace. What would take a company years to build in-house, Roadz can launch for you within weeks, with no development resources required on your end, and no upfront costs.
Roadz “Ecosystem in a Box,” is designed to help fleet management solution providers, including vehicle OEMs, telematics providers, fleet leasing companies, mobility providers, fuel card providers and others, meet their customer expectations while positioning themselves as a leader in the market.
Why launch a Roadz-powered marketplace for your fleet customers?
- You’ll retain existing customers while also attracting new ones. Select from a catalog of carefully curated, integrated third-party solutions across dozens of fleet categories. This will enable you to meet the ever-evolving needs of your existing customers while also attracting a new base with a ‘future proofed’ offering.
- You can upsell. Upsell/cross-sell your own proprietary solutions, features, and add-on modules in a more effective way.
- Roadz does the work for you. With no development work required on your end, it’s easy to create a custom marketplace, expertly curated to fit the exact needs of your fleet customers no matter their size, class, or vertical. The goal is to give every customer that visits your unique marketplace the power to choose what works best for them. In just a few weeks, you can have a customized marketplace.
- Billing is simple. Worried about the complexity of billing for 3rd-party solutions? Roadz can manage billing and collection for you.
Prioritizing choice and relevance as focal points for your strategy will help guide your business goals, keep you relevant and competitive in the space and ultimately lead to growth for both you and your customers. However, those aren’t the only important concepts to consider! Stay tuned for our next blog in the series, where we’ll dive into the importance of data integration, why fleets are demanding it, and how to implement it.
In the meantime, click here to download our resource for more information about What Fleets Want in 2021 and Beyond.
If you’re interested in scheduling a free demo with our team of experts, complete the form here and we’ll connect with you to discover your best path for offering choice and relevance to your fleet customers.