Truckcom Blog

Good support is vital to help users get the most from a system like Truckcom. We discovered this very early and our support principles grew out our earliest activities rolling out Truckcom software and devices to our first customer in late 2004.

The principles are quite easy to describe:

If someone needs help, the most fundamentally important thing for us to provide is a telephone helpline that they can call to speak to someone, there and then. Some businesses are run these days on the principle that they should try to avoid customers calling them – but for us the helpline operation is a central part of our business

On-screen help is very powerful. We do this with office users, of course (lots of IT companies can do that now) but crucially we do it with mobile users as well. When a truck driver in Scotland sees us pressing buttons on his smartphone remotely from Essex, sometimes he’s slightly spooked but he’s always grateful

Whatever the question, we should try to answer it. Often users in their first few days with Truckcom will ask several questions, which don’t relate to whether the system is working properly or not, but just arise because they’re new to it. If we do our jobs properly in these early days, the users will be well informed and won’t need to call us again, and everybody wins

Treat people with respect. Some people who call our helpline have been driving for a living for a long time, and might not, initially, be that keen to use a system like Truckcom. But if we deal with them in a friendly and helpful way, always asking for their name and using it in our conversations with them, we can often win them over

System uptime is very, very important. On the small handful of  times we’ve suffered a major service outage with Truckcom, each time we’ve put things right within 30 minutes at the most – often before most users have even noticed a problem. The most frustrating thing is dealing with service problems that aren’t ours (for instance, when one of the mobile networks has a funny turn) – but even then, we see it as our job to try to get them to fix it and keep everyone informed

So now, six years on from those earliest experiences of support, we regard support as a central part of our business, and we pride ourselves on the level of support we offer. A lot of the product design work we do focusses on avoiding problems – making the system easier to use, less likely to go wrong. But we know that while this can reduce the number of support calls and keep them handle-able, it can never eliminate them.

(related posts – Truckcom Mobile is now available on Android and The £40 Smartphone has arrived)

When we first designed Truckcom, several years ago, the central idea was to use the mobile devices as the heart of the system. The people we were competing against then (and almost as much now) were doing something very different – they were bolting a black box into each vehicle and then tracking that.

But we thought there was a lot more flexibility in using ‘phones. Two different kinds of flexibility:

1. It’s really easy to move the devices between different vehicles. If you have a hire vehicle on your fleet for a day, you can still track it; and if you change a vehicle on your fleet, there are no removal/refitting costs with Truckcom – unlike with the black box people.

2. You can do so much more with a mobile device, with a touch-screen, than you can with just a black box. The black boxes can maybe get some engine data from the vehicle, and maybe get a key entry from the driver to see which driver is in the vehicle, but that’s it. With a smartphone, you can get the same kind of geographic tracking, but you have lots of other possibilities that offer themselves:

• On-screen signatures – or “Electronic POD” as we’ve called it on our website. Easy to do with a smartphone, and it then takes care of a major headache in a lot of logistics businesses – the paper trail of delivery notes.
• On-screen vehicle checks. If your driver needs a device for voice calls, tracking, electronic POD etc. anyway, why not get them to record legally required vehicle checks on them as well. Pretty much all our customers do this – so it must be quite a good idea….
• … and of course SatNav. Easy to do, and cheap compared with a standalone device – so well worth considering. Of course you might want some of these options but not others, and of course that’s fine.

The striking thing about what has happened with mobile devices is how far they’ve developed right into our zone. Back in 2004, when we started, you couldn’t get any devices with built in Satnav receivers – it was the dreaded Bluetooth GPSs (and yes, they were a bit of a pain). Now, pretty much every smartphone device out there has a built in Satnav receiver – so we can track it on a map, and it can support commercial Satnav software, such as TomTom or CoPilot.

And now Smartphones are big news. Thanks to our friends at Apple, the world and their wives now have an iPhone – it’s a phenomenon. While iPhones are not that relevant to Truckcom (they’re expensive devices – we prefer the far cheaper and less “designer” windows and Android handsets) they have sparked mainstream interest in this sort of technology. Now lots of people can see how powerful a mobile device can be – and it sets them thinking how they could be used in different ways.