A return to mobility: Regaining Trust in a Post-Pandemic World 

We are optimists by nature. The best way to muscle through this pandemic is to invest in ways we can prepare for what the world will look like when it’s all over. Mobility operators who over communicate and provide transparency into every aspect of their services can seize huge opportunities. This series of blog posts, discusses ways fleet managers can regain trust once the world gets back moving again.

What will it take to get customers to feel comfortable in shared mobility, ride hail and rental vehicles again?

Since the crisis started, it seems that every operator revamped cleaning policies and scrambled to provide the materials needed to keep everyone safe. 

Will the promise of new cleaning standards be enough to regain trust? 

Blanket statements about cleaning procedures are better than nothing, but are they enough to clear the cloud of a global pandemic?

In the early days of ride hailing, one of the biggest challenges was convincing customers that gig-economy drivers were safe. Lyft and Uber made huge investments across the years to help gain our trust. One great example is the way they took internal facing technology, like vehicle location tracking, and exposed it to the customer. Tracking vehicles was nothing new, but the ability to track the ride of your loved one – was revolutionary and key to overcoming this barrier. Trust was the main challenge in the early days of ride hailing, today we are faced with a different kind of safety concern. Similar strategies could go a long way to overcome it.

What if mobility companies exposed every aspect of fleet management to their customers, including a detailed history of the way they disinfect vehicles? 

If faced with a choice between two vehicles, one that “says” it’s cleaned regularly and another that provides a log of exactly when it was cleaned. Which one would you choose?

Imagine walking up to a car, scanning the VIN with your smartphone and receiving a detailed cleaning history like the one pictured below.

Don’t just say it, prove it

Fleet managers that invest in scalable processes and layer customer-facing technology on top of them can deliver new levels of transparency and seize huge opportunities when the world starts moving again.

Here are a couple of adjustments to your operating procedures that can help enhance transparency:

Consolidate your cleaning services

Many fleets allow local managers to select small vendors for everything from fueling to preventive maintenance. For cleaning services this approach could hamper your ability to provide visibility to customers. Selecting a national, tech-enabled provider like Spiffy, Booster Fuels or Ridekleen might be a wiser option. They are likely to have scalable systems to help track processes, which would in turn empower you to expose them to your customers.

Invest in digital solutions

The shortest route to scale when implementing a new process like enhanced disinfection is making it digital. If it takes a human calling another human to get a vehicle cleaned it will become practically impossible to track those requests and fulfillments. Digital scales from day one. If requests are entered digitally you can access data and logs about them which is the first step to exposing them to every stakeholder, especially customers that might be concerned about the spread of Covid-19.

Operate on one ticketing system

Bouncing around systems to track cleaning, fuel, roadside and every other aspect of managing a fleet is a recipe for bad customer experience and a waste of operating dollars. We recommend non-vertical specific solutions like Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud and Hubspot as the most efficient way to set up the backbone of your fleet services contact center. Once these are in place, your fleet services vendors can easily integrate with them.

Pumping data into one central source of truth is a huge step toward leveraging the information to provide transparency to drivers, and a great driver of efficiency for your operation.

Moving forward, customers will demand more visibility into cleaning procedures than ever before. Mobility operators that adjust their processes quickly and layer new customer-facing communication tools on top of them will be the first to regain trust and prosper in a post-pandemic world.