As a fleet, one of the most significant costs you face is insurance. With profit margins in the industry averaging 5%, and insurance costs rising by double digits over the past three years, fleets need to employ strategies that will reduce liability and lower insurance expenditures.
John Simms, Senior Risk Advisor at HNI, and Jeff Davis, Vice President of Safety at Napa River Insurance Services, listed strategies fleets can use to reduce their insurance costs and obtain fair rates during the Week of Webinars – Safety Edition session “Insurance Cost Triggers and How to Reduce Them.”
#1: Be Transparent With Your Driver Data
Insurers are looking for long-term partnerships, and the foundation of any partnership is transparency. While many fleets are cagey about sharing their data with insurers, this attitude is more likely to hurt than help. CSA scores alone don’t give a full picture of your fleet’s safety, and adding more context to those scores can show that your fleet is safer than the CSA system indicates. Sharing data also shows insurers that you’re willing to be upfront with them about your safety, which can go a long way toward building a lasting relationship.
#2: Develop an Action Plan to Shore Up Weak Spots
Insurers want to see that you understand your fleet as a whole and its weaknesses. They’re not merely gauging risk based on your data alone; they’re also gauging risk based on the people running your fleet. If you can demonstrate that you’ve identified areas where your fleet can improve safety—and you have a plan in place to make those improvements—insurers will be more likely to give you a reasonable quote.
#3: Demonstrate Your Safety Culture with a Walkthrough
Insurance companies understand that a strong safety culture can mark the difference between a safe fleet with a one-off incident on their record and an unsafe fleet with a similar CSA score. Demonstrating your safety culture requires transparency, and a walkthrough of your fleet is the ultimate form of transparency. To quote Jeff Davis:
“You can sit in a dispatch room and tell by the way dispatchers are talking to drivers as far as what kind of culture that company has.”
If you have a strong safety culture, you should be excited to show that to any agents you’re working with. If you offer your agent the opportunity to visit your fleet, it shows you are confident in the safety culture you’ve built.
Executing On All Three Strategies
Where should you start to implement these strategies? Fortunately, there’s a technology solution that supports all three of these strategies and can help you make changes right now.
The Idelic Safety Suite is trucking’s premier driver management platform, which uses proprietary AI technology to organize and analyze your data and identify risk hidden in the firehose of data hitting your fleet every day. Safety Suite makes it easy to understand the issues your fleet faces, develop an action plan to address them, and quickly and easily access the key metrics insurers are looking for.
Safety Suite also helps foster a strong safety culture by bringing safety managers, dispatchers, and drivers closer together. With Safety Suite, you can set up automated touchpoints so you’re always checking in with your drivers, responding to their feedback, and fostering a sense of belonging. Follow a standardized escalation process more easily than ever with Safety Suite to reduce liability and avoid facing a nuclear verdict, making your fleet a safe bet for insurers.