“What are you doing, Dave?”

When we talked with Corey Cat­ten, Chief Tech­nol­ogy Offi­cer at inthinc Tech­nol­ogy Solu­tions, among other ser­vices the com­pany offers we were intrigued by the company’s in-cab, real-time ver­bal men­tor­ing. Cit­ing a fleet with thou­sands of dri­vers, Cat­ten says they saw a 95 per­cent reduc­tion in speed­ing and almost erased all speed­ing in the fleet by the third week of use. While inthinc tested beep­ing when the dri­ver made a dan­ger­ous or inef­fi­cient move, he says, “There is some­thing more human and com­pelling about a voice in chang­ing dri­ver behavior.”

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By Mike Sheldrick, Senior Editor

Amer­i­Fleet Trans­porta­tion pres­i­dent John Nor­ris says, “Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, in its essence, is the feel­ing a client has through every inter­ac­tion with your orga­ni­za­tion, through­out their ‘jour­ney’ with you. In some busi­nesses that jour­ney may be sim­ply a one-off trans­ac­tion. In our case, the jour­ney is over many, many, many years.

“We build cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, not just through the cus­tomer ser­vice reps that are a com­po­nent of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, not just through the billing depart­ment, not just through the order entry folks, but at every touch point through­out the journey.”

We vis­ited AmeriFleet’s newly-opened Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Cen­ter this spring and talked with many of the folks who are respon­si­ble for build­ing and deliv­er­ing that cus­tomer expe­ri­ence; we were excited to hear how they do it.

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Toronto-based equip­ment finance com­pany Ele­ment Finan­cial Cor­po­ra­tion has entered into a defin­i­tive agree­ment to acquire the assets and oper­a­tions of PHH Arval for approx­i­mately $1.4 billion.

“This trans­for­ma­tive acqui­si­tion achieves all of the strate­gic and finan­cial objec­tives that we estab­lished when we set out to expand our domes­tic fleet man­age­ment busi­ness into the U.S. mar­ket,” said Steven K. Hud­son, Element’s Chair­man and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer. “It pro­vides us with a fully inte­grated North Amer­i­can fleet man­age­ment offer­ing that com­ple­ments our other three busi­ness ver­ti­cals at the same time that it is accre­tive to our share­hold­ers and imme­di­ately improves our cap­i­tal effi­ciency,” added Mr. Hudson.

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Prov­ing yet again to be a true global fleet man­age­ment provider, Lease­Plan USA was hon­ored for the third con­sec­u­tive year as a Global Out­sourc­ing 100 com­pany by the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Out­sourc­ing Pro­fes­sion­als (IAOP).

This pres­ti­gious list includes com­pa­nies from around the world that pro­vide the full spec­trum of out­sourc­ing services.

“It is a true achieve­ment to be rec­og­nized as a Global Out­sourc­ing 100 com­pany for the third con­sec­u­tive year. With our global foot­print in 32 coun­tries, we are able to uti­lize our global exper­tise, con­sult­ing and our unique and inno­v­a­tive tools to help clients run a suc­cess­ful global busi­ness and fleet, said Michael A. Pitcher, pres­i­dent and CEO of Lease­Plan USA.

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ARI, lead­ing global fleet ser­vices provider is among the final­ists in two dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories for the 2014 Amer­i­can Busi­ness Awards – Video: Cor­po­rate Overview and Cor­po­rate Social Respon­si­bil­ity Pro­gram of the Year – and will ulti­mately receive a Gold, Sil­ver, or Bronze Ste­vie Award in each area.

More than 3,300 nom­i­na­tions from orga­ni­za­tions of all sizes and in vir­tu­ally every indus­try were sub­mit­ted this year for con­sid­er­a­tion in a wide range of categories.

READ MORE to find out more about the awards.

Did you know that GPS fleet track­ing can help your busi­ness gen­er­ate more rev­enue? Not only does this tech­nol­ogy help increase the effi­ciency of your fleet, it also helps you make money too. Increase employee pro­duc­tiv­ity, main­tain fleet health, and serve more cus­tomers with the help of and advanced GPS fleet track­ing solu­tion, like GPS Insight.

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GE Cap­i­tal received two notable CIO 100 awards for its inno­v­a­tive IT projects—one using big data and ana­lyt­ics to improve com­mer­cial fleet man­age­ment and the other intro­duc­ing new tech­nolo­gies to drive con­sumer adop­tion of mobile payments.

GE Capital’s Fleet Ser­vices’ Fleet Optimizer—a soft­ware appli­ca­tion that com­bines pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics, geospa­tial visu­al­iza­tion and an enhanced user experience—helps opti­mize spend­ing and uti­liza­tion for vehi­cle fleets.

READ MORE to learn more about the appli­ca­tions and awards.

Mary Barra didn’t mince words with her take on a sting­ing inter­nal assess­ment of what went wrong in the igni­tion switch recall scan­dal blamed for at least 13 deaths and nearly 50 accidents.

Barra  called the 315– page report by Anton Valukas, a for­mer U.S. attor­ney, “extremely thor­ough, bru­tally tough and deeply trou­bling.” It details “a his­tory of fail­ures” in which “nobody took respon­si­bil­ity” and there was “no demon­strated sense of urgency” in a saga “rid­dled with failures.”

With doc­u­mented cor­rob­o­ra­tion of insid­ers, Barra included, it con­firms in stark terms the dark under­side of GM’s cul­ture, prov­ing some of the worst, most car­i­ca­tured aspects of old GM exist still in the new one.

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Brand per­cep­tion now plays a vital role in new vehi­cle sales growth and used vehi­cle value reten­tion. Honda and Mercedes-Benz deliver the high­est qual­ity vehi­cles, accord­ing to ALG’s Brand Per­cep­tion of Qual­ity (BPQ) study. Honda had the high­est Main­stream brand rat­ings, fol­lowed by Toy­ota and Volk­swa­gen. Mercedes-Benz led Pre­mium brands, fol­lowed by Lexus and BMW. Euro­pean automak­ers took six of the top seven Main­stream brands.

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Tel­o­gis notched its sec­ond OEM win in recent months when it announced an exclu­sive rela­tion­ship to power Hino Insight 2.O a com­pre­hen­sive web-based telem­at­ics solu­tion aimed specif­i­cally for the needs of the medium-based com­mer­cial truck mar­ket. Ear­lier this year Tel­o­gis announced an agree­ment to pro­vide telem­at­ics solu­tions to GM fleet cus­tomers select­ing GM’s OnStar. Prior to that, Tel­o­gis had forged truck-based rela­tion­ships with Ford and Volvo.

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