Service-based businesses have a lot of musts: Must have equipment. Must have vehicles. Must have customers! Must meet payroll. Must balance budgets. Must get insurance.
“Failure to insure against key liability risks is especially dangerous for small businesses,” says Loretta Worters, Vice President of Communications for the Insurance Information Institute.
“You don’t have the financial resources of a big company to back you up in the event of a client lawsuit.”
The list of insurance policies might seem endless. Faced with general liability, errors and omissions, auto, and workers’ compensation policies, it might seem like there’s no way to see any savings. The reality is that implementing a GPS system helps save money in a variety of ways.
Insurance Savings Just For Tracking
Most insurance companies will offer discounts of up to 20% just for installing a GPS system. The reasons are simple. It shows you’re serious about protecting your assets from theft. It demonstrates a commitment to safe driving. Many will even provide GPS tracking in exchange for the discount.
The downside is that many of the insurance provided programs rely on a mobile app and your phone’s GPS, which limits the power of an independent GPS system. A service like Linxup doesn’t just provide data on driving behaviors. It includes geofencing, routing, after hours use alerts, dispatching, and more. Dash cameras can be added to tie video evidence to driving alerts and greatly deter theft.
Protecting Against Theft—Of All Kinds
One disaster recovery company has been tracking with Linxup for over six years. They learned how helpful GPS can be when a vehicle was recently stolen. A service truck full of equipment was left open in a customer’s driveway while the crew unloaded materials. When they came out to find it gone, they immediately called into the office. The owner was able to pull up the vehicle location from his mobile app and police tracked it down within 30 minutes.
A cleaning and maintenance company found they were being robbed in a different way. The long time Linxup customer quickly found the value of GPS when he started matching submitted job tickets for payroll against vehicle locations. He discovered some employees were submitting time for jobs they had not been on, while others were moonlighting with company vehicles and equipment on the weekends. See how JBK Landscaping used GPS tracking to recover a $30,000 track loader that was taken from the job site.
Avoiding Liability
The cleaning and maintenance company also found that GPS data was helpful for liabilities. One employee crashed a company vehicle en route to a job site and attempted to sue, claiming that the job location involved hazardous road conditions. Checking the history of the employee’s driving behavior revealed a pattern of speeding; needless to say the case was dropped.
That experience taught the owner to put a program in place to monitor driver behavior and reward safe driving practices, eliminating both the risk of accidents and excessive wear and tear on his vehicles.
Even More Protection With Video
One customer recounted being able to successfully defend several accidents claims with video proof showing her drivers were not at fault. By pairing dash cams with GPS tracking, video clips can be matched to GPS alerts, or found by time/date, and downloaded easily to share with law enforcement or insurance agencies, saving thousands of dollars in payments and fines.
Saving 20% on insurance is a good enough reason to implement GPS. Owning that GPS data opens the door for even more savings with safer driving, theft protection, improved customer service, and more.
