If a fleet manager gives their contract hire or fleet management provider a score of, let’s say, 85% (100% being excellent), but the drivers give a combined rating of 60%, who is right?

Because as driver feedback starts being gathered in far greater volumes by our Touchpoint system, issues like this are going to become far more the norm in fleet sector reviews .

The reality is that, like any data, you need to dig deep to establish the root causes of a rating, whether good or bad.

Let’s take the simplistic example of a company who has decided to cut costs. The brief to its contract hire company is to re-engineer the vehicle choice list to offer lower cost vehicles, to limit the policy to restricted badges, to be far more strict with driver requests and impose a tighter regime of cost control across the board.

The leasing company achieves this successfully and the fleet manager ranks their performance as excellent.

Of course, I hardly need to tell you what will happen to driver satisfaction levels. They will almost inevitably drop as drivers cannot have the vehicle they desire and limitations impact them in other areas too.

But it’s always better to have the data, than not.

By gathering very large volumes of driver feedback helps measure service levels, conduct reviews and manage suppliers – as long as its looked at properly, and not just viewed on its headline statistic. Because, I could flip this round the other way and suggest that if driver satisfaction was at 90%, does that mean the leasing company is doing its job well? Maybe yes, but not necessarily when judged against the ‘company agenda’.

So, my point here is that, as with any research, it’s important to look at the story behind the headline.

The good news is that our Touchpoint system enables additional, bespoke questions to be asked if a fleet manager needs to get to the bottom of a particular issue and find out more.

However, the leasing company account managers that work with fleet operators across the UK will need to treat this new level of information with extreme care, spending more time interpreting and considering the results than ever before to ensure that the meaning behind the data is fully understood. On the upside though, its very easy to interpret the information and the whole process will lead to far more powerful client relationships.