3 Ways Geofences Improve Your Fleet Management

Are you asking yourself, how does geofencing work, and why is it worth investing in for my business? 

With a GPS vehicle tracking solution and geofencing technology, you can supercharge your team’s efficiency and ability to serve customers well. 

That might seem like a lot for one solution to offer, but hear us out. 

Today, let’s talk about geofencing and how you can use it to boost your business. We’ll start with the basics. 

What is geofencing? 

Through geofencing, you can set up a defined perimeter—a virtual fence—around a specific real-world area. For example, you can draw a geofence around a jobsite where your employees will be working or around a building where your employees pick up and drop off shipments. 

Then, thanks to GPS or RFID, you can set up instantaneous alerts (such as mobile text messages or email notifications) that keep you apprised whenever your employees enter or leave those geofenced areas.

With geofencing to monitor when your team members—or, more accurately, their GPS tracking devices—enter or exit an area, you can relax and rely on a notification whenever their device is entering or exiting a geofence. 

This can help you keep tabs on your valuable assets too, which is invaluable, especially with equipment theft on the rise! 

Ultimately, geofences improve customer satisfaction and help your business grow. Sound too good to be true? Can virtual perimeters and geofenced areas really help you out that much? 

Here’s what you need to know. 

Geofences help customers prepare for their service. 

Have you ever scheduled service at your home and been told that the tech will show up at some point within a four-hour window? How much did you love setting aside that time or wondering when, precisely, you needed to prepare for the appointment? 

Hint: Your customers feel the same about anticipating your rep’s arrival. With geofences enabled, you can set automatic alerts for your team or customers to send notifications when your employee crosses a virtual boundary. This not only alleviates frustration but also means that your customers can prep equipment or set aside shipments for pickup. Then, when your tech arrives on-site, they’ll be ready to get to work immediately.

In other words, this is an efficiency and customer satisfaction win-win.

If your technician is delayed due to traffic or other unavoidable circumstances, your customers can receive a notification and update their arrangements accordingly. 

Geofences help you boost productivity. 

What gets measured or monitored gets improved. (A truism but also true.) 

If your team is aware that you, the customer, and other involved parties will know when they’re arriving and departing a jobsite, they’ll tend to be a little more intentional about when they show up and leave. You’ll likely see higher rates of people showing up on time and only leaving when a shift is over. If an employee knows they need to hit a specific pickup time for a customer in a geofenced region, they’ll tend to be far more punctual.

Increased punctuality drives productivity. Both you and your employees will be more cognizant of time spent on site, allowing them more time to work and get stuff done. This can help increase customer satisfaction too—and boost the reputation you have in your community. 

Geofencing software can streamline reporting and billing.

Here’s a universal truth: Reporting and billing aren’t the most fun parts of running a business. 

What if you were able to pull accurate, updated-in-real-time datasets to help streamline the paperwork you need to go through before invoicing a client? 

With geofencing and GPS tracking software, you can keep tabs on how long employees are on a jobsite without having to rely on physical, handwritten time cards (which can get lost or destroyed) or employees’ self-reporting time through online platforms (which require connectivity and rely on your employees’ memories). 

Instead, GPS tracking software and geofencing give you high-confidence data in front of you in real-time. If your customer challenges you on billing, you have data to back up your employee’s time cards. Having documented proof of your field service tech’s time and whereabouts can be necessary beyond the building too (e.g., for service-level agreement purposes). 

Bonus: Geofencing software can prevent unauthorized and after-hours access and theft.

Ensuring that your fleet can’t leave a predefined virtual perimeter during certain periods—whether at the end of a workday or on the weekend when operations are shut down—protects your vehicles by preventing unauthorized access.

Not only does geofencing help your business avoid potential property damage and misuse of company assets, but it also prevents theft by making it impossible for vehicles to leave the geographical areas you select.

Interested in boosting your business by creating geofences and leveraging GPS tracking software? 

Geofencing empowers you with better insights into where your team members are in real-time and allows you to share that information with customers or save it for easy referencing later. 

This gives you more control over your operation, helps your customers feel they have more control over their experience, and provides business-boosting benefits everyone can enjoy. GPS tracking software and geofencing can even help your team grow revenue! 

Seem like a big thing to claim? Read about how one of our clients used geofencing and GPS tracking to keep track of their crews—and ultimately saved big on overtime.

Interested in learning more? ClearPathGPS is here to help! Call a friendly member of our team to get started today.