The mobile fuel industry faces challenges of every size. From gate codes that malfunction when your driver is trying to make a delivery to managing the connections between apps to adjusting your pricing to accommodate the price of crude oil per barrel on a global scale. But outside of these obstacles, large and small, are the trials and tribulations that make your day just a little harder or a little longer.
A lot of businesses talk about how their product will solve them – their product will make you more efficient. And in many cases, mobile fuel delivery does just that. We talk about it constantly. Starting your business day with a full tank can make a big difference in time and money wasted on trips to the gas station.
But what about making our business – the business of fuel distribution and mobile fueling – more efficient? Since we began, this has been a cause near and dear to the heart of Booster’s team. So let’s take a look at these challenges and how Booster goes about solving them…and how you might be able to benefit from our solutions in the future too.
Digitizing Dispatch
Dispatch activities have always been challenging problems. For one, there are a lot of moving parts to consider when you are the one coordinating drivers, tankers, fuel inventory, and customer needs. It was one of the biggest challenges Booster faced as we grew, and it’s one we have worked hard to solve. We moved thoughtfully and kept consideration of all logical constraints that might affect how we service an order from start to finish as we built a software solution that worked for us and for our customers.
It was especially important to us that the software we built removed steps and time-consuming processes – not that it just solved one problem but that it solved many. At Booster, we wanted all the components of an order to speak to each other and inform our shift decision making. Our driver schedules needed to align with our terminal locations, and our tanker inventory to align with our orders. And we had to be able to ensure the drivers we scheduled had current licensing and certificates to operate the trucks they had available to them during a given shift. Now, our proprietary software connects all the dots and lets Booster drag and drop order needs into a planning portal that cross references truck locations and driver schedules. All it took was connecting the abundance of data points in our systems – from customer records and orders to vital integrations like ComData and GeoTab and other telematics to our own fuel inventory.
Preventing Miscommunication with Telematics
Every business that handles the back-and-forth between customers and service providers knows that disputes can often become a he said, she said conundrum. We also faced this challenge. Our drivers would go out, run into snags en route like out of place vehicles, tanks that were listed to be filled that didn’t need filling, and other physical problems with completing their tasks. The next day, customers had questions. Sometimes they aligned with driver experience. Sometimes they didn’t.
As we approached solving this challenge, we wanted to center the customer experience as we built. After all, they couldn’t be on-site overnight, each night, to monitor deliveries, and neither could our managers. That would be a waste of resources and would do little to build trust with our team or our customers. Luckily there was a technological solution: telematics.
As a service, telematic systems utilize data from GPS, on-board diagnostics (OBD), and other sensors that collect the data about location, performance, driver behavior, and maintenance needs. The information is then sent to a central hub where it can be analyzed, allowing for real-time monitoring in fleet management. This kind of monitoring also improves safety and allows for more efficient operations. And most importantly, it keeps both the customer team and our team informed.
Booster built telematic monitoring across our system, installing hardware into our tankers, providing customers with software that would allow our company assets to speak securely to each other, and sharing that shared data in a concise, centralized fashion through our customer dashboard. We found it created opportunities for trust and almost completely eliminated time consuming customer service inquiries thanks to their access to the data. Questions come up – they can check the dashboard. It saves headaches and time.
Centering Our Customer Experience
As we built Booster mobile fuel delivery, we found that understanding the services and perks that made our customers happy was as important as filling their tanks. And one of the most important features our clients have access to is data that shows how their fleet is performing both on the road and in their budget. With the help of our telematics integration and all the data that is part of the dispatch systems at Booster, we have been able to highlight these key data points clearly.
From order to payment, Booster takes the time to thoroughly on-board every customer to our dashboards and customer tracking processes so that every customer understands what different portals tell them and what action they see on their lot corresponds with each data point in the dashboard.
Our clients have reported that the way we on-board is one thing that makes them so confident in Booster’s service. If we’re taking this amount of time just to make sure they know where everything is, then we must be taking similar care with every aspect of our business. You may recognize this philosophical approach if you’ve ever read up on our Perfect Boost commitment.
Alongside this care in on-boarding is a simplified approach to all the tools that fleet managers are already familiar with. Booster has long standing relationships with AtoB, Wex, ComData and more, and integrating your company’s accounts into the Booster dashboard is straightforward and easy.
Once our service representatives have gotten a client onboard, the dashboard we’ve built is the final piece of the puzzle to happy customers. In one central command center, we let them manage assets, pay invoices, adjust order needs, and even see their fleet in real-time. It turns their management cycle from reactive to proactive, and helps them streamline operations and cut down on costs.
Since we started delivering fuel to companies on the west coast, Booster has put the customer experience at the center of everything we do. From our Perfect Boost commitment to our homegrown software and hardware integrations. If you’re interested in learning more about how Booster builds software for fleets of the future, fill out our contact form and get in touch with a member of our team.