The AA bagged both the Accident Management and Vehicle Recovery gongs in the 2013 BusinessCar Awards earlier this year, marking a successive four years of category wins for the former and two years on the trot for the latter service.

BusinessCar caught up with the organisations’ head of accident management, Dave Bartlett, who explained that despite the huge and well-known brand that sits behind the business, the company’s popular status isn’t the reason for its success here; rather, it is the fact that BusinessCar readers are the ones voting for it.

Bartlett explains:?”When that’s voted for by people, they must be using it, otherwise they wouldn’t be voting for it. The crux of it is that accidents are emotive. Many people have used and experienced it, so I don’t think it’s clouded by the AA brand.”

He believes that the firm’s approach of treating company car drivers the same as it treats consumers is one of the reasons why it has gone down well in the fleet community.

“There can sometimes be a stigma with the company car driver that nobody really cares for them. We’ve got this huge consumer brand that’s all about customer service – that has to correlate to the fleet driver.” 

He continues: “There are so many accident management companies that say ‘look at our fantastic systems and products’, but in reality, what we’ve got is an individual who has been given a company car – so should we treat them any differently to a consumer? What does that driver need? He wants his car repaired and he wants it repaired promptly and back to him as soon as possible.

“And if you’re his fleet, what do you want? You want that vehicle back on the road as quickly as possible so that your driver’s back on the road, because it’s downtime. That’s the difference with fleets to consumers because the cost implications of a vehicle off the road are far greater than what they would be to a consumer. For a fleet driver you can really quantify how much it is costing them to be off the road.”

Not just a pretty face

Away from the accident management arena, the AA has acquired specialist driver training firms Nationwide 4×4 and Peak Performance within the past 18 months, which Bartlett describes as “sitting well with AA Drivetech [the organisation’s existing fleet driver training arm]”.

He continues: We have the facilities to feed-in management information from our roadside assistance service. That will tell you ‘Dave keeps calling the AA out – he keeps kerbing his tyres or running out of fuel’, so as an individual, there’s management information about him. What you get is a full risk profile for that fleet.

“What we have to be is corrective with that driver rather than punitive. What we can say is that with investment in driver training in this individual we can address why he’s doing what he is.

“All of that has got to add up to a cut in cost to the fleet because they’re not hiring risky drivers, they’re not having accidents, and it’s got to correlate to a lower insurance premium.”

Bartlett reckons there are a few pitfalls for fleets when they’re buying into an accident management package, namely a large number of companies that over-promise and under-deliver.

“It’s always an investment. Risk management products are fantastic but there’s a cost to them. It’s tough times, but then it’s an easy sell on the fear of things like corporate manslaughter,” he says.

“As a fleet it would be very easy to be seduced by companies who come in, profess to do everything but only do one thing. The issue has to be once that contract’s gone live with that customer. Does that company have the confidence in that supplier’s ability to deliver? It’s very easy as a fleet to have your head turned by a supplier because they’re promising a lot.”

He adds that the best way to make the most of any such service is for fleet operators to string together the different areas of their business that have an impact on running business cars.

“Sometimes fleet managers can be distant from their drivers. It’s making sure that all parts of a fleet’s company have bought into [the service]. Has their insurance division, their procurement people, the HR people bought into it? That’s a huge challenge – making sure a fleet manager and the fleet’s insurance manager are working together – because the output is absolutely linked.”