Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States and a major source of emergency room visits. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation’s public health agency, even treats motor vehicle safety as one of its primary concerns.
Speed is a major contributor to the severity of a collision. One of the best ways to significantly reduce both the frequency and severity of collisions is by using data to identify at-risk drivers. With concrete data, you can look at each driver’s baseline, and then help that driver improve over time.
How to promote safe driving
As valuable as it is to identify and coach at-risk drivers, it’s equally important to use the readily available information to identify those doing it right and publicly acknowledge them with an incentive. Rewards and recognition signals your management’s commitment to promoting a safety culture by reinforcing safe behavior.
Such efforts create a gamification opportunity that involves drivers in a healthy competition to see who can be the safest driver, while providing transparency in the data collection and analysis. Drivers see what their supervisors see and rejoice when great drivers are recognized.
Safer driving may lower insurance premiums
We all understand that safer fleets should pay lower premiums. While some companies are seeing premium increases, those sharing driver data with their insurers are holding last year’s rates, and in some cases even seeing premiums decrease.
Behavior-based insurance, which is new to the industry, links premiums directly to predictive metrics because it has been clearly demonstrated that fleets actively engaging with the metrics on their Geotab dashboard can bring loss costs under control. The data creates transparency for the fleet and underwriters by making visible the steps a company is taking to proactively reduce risk, improve driver consistency and change the safety culture.
With objective safety scores based on actual driving data, fleets can benchmark their performance and demonstrate improvement over time, which can lead to the application of additional safety credits for the fleet. Several innovative insurers, convinced by the results of providing more frequent incentives to fleets, have instituted earned premium credit and debit systems to reward effective safety programs each month.
We can help you increase driver safety and reduce insurance costs
In an environment where commercial auto insurance premiums can rise by as much as 20% year over year, having a behavior-based rating system that reduces your premium is very helpful to save costs in the long run. Give us a call to discuss how we can work together to implement the right systems and tools to reduce your risks down the road.
