Based in Fulham, South London, Town & Country Gardens has been offering a wide range of gardening services including garden maintenance, landscaping and tree surgery for over 20 years.
The company operates a fleet consisting of six vans, some equipped for gardening and others for landscaping purposes. Currently, the company has 14 core staff, but the number of employees nearly doubles when extra help is hired during the summer. This used to boost the overspending on staff hours even further, until director Ben Skinner signed up to the Fleetmatics REVEAL tracking system two years ago.
“Before getting Fleetmatics, the biggest problem for us was overspending on staffing hours,” said Skinner “We used to rely on our staff to report their own hours at the end of the day when they returned on site, but this meant that we ended up paying for a lot of hours that were just not justified. After installing Fleetmatics GPS tracking, the change was almost immediate; in the first year we saved almost £20,000 in staff hours. These savings alone made the introduction of the tracking system worthwhile.”
The company has seen improvements in other areas of business as well, thanks to REVEAL’s Live Map feature, which has provided the company with new ways to beat the traffic.
“Thanks to the live feed, we can now see if our staff are taking inefficient routes on their way to the next customer. This enables us to redirect them to a better route and avoid unnecessary delays,” Skinner said.
Overall, he believes that fleet tracking has helped the company improve their customer service and the increased accountability brought by the many features of REVEAL has had a positive effect on the company image.
The tracking system has also proven helpful on the rare occasion when billing issues have arisen with customers. With customers often not at home when the gardeners are at work, the ability to prove that staff were on site for the hours the customer has been billed for gives the company credibility.
“We don’t have a high complaint rate anyway, but having the tracking system in place heads off problems. Thanks to Fleetmatics, we are now able to prove by the minute exactly how long our staff were on site, when they arrived and what time they left,” Skinner added.
