By Jeofrey Bean

Jeofrey Bean is the co-author of the busi­ness lead­er­ship book The Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Rev­o­lu­tion – How Com­pa­nies like Apple, Ama­zon, and Star­bucks Have Changed Busi­ness Forever.

What is Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence? Does your com­pany have a con­sis­tent and well-known answer that guides deci­sions and actions to cre­ate cus­tomer advocates?

We’ve asked many peo­ple within the same com­pany and many peo­ple from dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies to tell us what they mean by cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. We’ve learned that the chances of get­ting a con­sis­tent def­i­n­i­tion are small. Peo­ple answer based on their expe­ri­ence and what their sit­u­a­tion or role is. This is fine on an indi­vid­ual basis. But when you’re a com­pany seri­ously eying a cus­tomer lead­er­ship posi­tion so you can be bet­ter, dif­fer­ent and more prof­itable, you need a con­sis­tent and well-known def­i­n­i­tion of cus­tomer experience.

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In the face of shrink­ing bud­gets and ris­ing fuel costs, sev­eral Ven­tura city depart­ments com­bined forces to pur­sue their fleet man­age­ment goals. This included acquir­ing an afford­able vehi­cle track­ing tech­nol­ogy that could help lower main­te­nance costs, reduce vehi­cle idling, and improve dri­ver behav­ior. Man­agers also wanted to improve rout­ing effi­ciency to enhance deliv­ery of ser­vices to the com­mu­nity. Add in an aggres­sive envi­ron­men­tal goal to reduce fuel use by 10 per­cent, and depart­ment man­agers faced a sig­nif­i­cant challenge.

READ MORE to learn how the City of Ven­tura com­bined patented GPS vehi­cle track­ing tech­nol­ogy with remote diag­nos­tic mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ties to achieve a work­able solution.

The Net­work of Employ­ers for Traf­fic Safety (NETS) is call­ing on lead­ers of com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions to adopt ele­ments of road safety for all employees—not just busi­ness dri­vers— as a core com­po­nent of the organization’s safety cul­ture. NETS has launched a free com­pre­hen­sive online tool kit to help ini­ti­ate or strengthen employee safety pro­grams by includ­ing road safety.

The 2014 Drive Safely Work Week (DSWW) tool kit, themed “Dri­ving your safety cul­ture home,” builds the case for exec­u­tive lead­er­ship to adopt safe dri­ving as a part of the cor­po­rate safety cul­ture and pro­vides low-cost steps to engage employ­ees with a start­ing point focused on seat belts and mobile device use while driving.

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Have you been burned by GPS track­ing tech­nol­ogy in the past, and find that you are now com­pletely turned off to the idea? Being hes­i­tant after a bad expe­ri­ence is under­stand­able, but not all GPS track­ing solu­tions are cre­ated equally — and there are plenty of rea­sons to try out a bet­ter qual­ity solu­tion to man­ager your fleet operations.

READ MORE, and see what some of the Red Flags are that you should watch out for.

As astute car shop­pers know, there’s more to sav­ing money on a car than sim­ply nego­ti­at­ing the low­est price on a given model. Long-term own­er­ship costs – specif­i­cally insur­ance, fuel econ­omy and repairs – can vary sig­nif­i­cantly from one vehi­cle to another, even within select vehi­cle and/or price classes.

Such fac­tors can vary by as much as $3,800 on aver­age over a five-year own­er­ship period, based solely on where a motorist lives, accord­ing to a recent analy­sis com­piled by Bankrate.com, with sev­eral Mid­west states boast­ing the low­est annual costs overall.

READ MORE to get the state-by-state data

At least eight states have intro­duced bills that would restrict the use of Google Glass while dri­ving. But the pro­posed mea­sures tar­get­ing the company’s hi-tech spec­ta­cles have stalled, fail­ing to clear a sin­gle chamber.

But even if the bills gained trac­tion, they would be “prac­ti­cally unen­force­able,” accord­ing to a new research paper by William & Mary law pro­fes­sor Adam Ger­showitz, who sug­gests his own leg­isla­tive solution.

READ MORE about the bills

On aver­age, vehi­cles seri­ously injure or kill some­one in New York every two hours; last year, 173 pedes­tri­ans were killed. Last week Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill allow­ing New York City to enact a city­wide default speed limit of 25 miles per hour as part of its “Vision Zero” cam­paign to reduce traf­fic deaths to nil.

When the speed at which a car strikes a pedes­trian rises a mere 10 m.p.h. — to 40 m.p.h. from 30 — the chance of the pedestrian’s dying rises to 85 per­cent from 45. The real ques­tion is not absolute speed but appro­pri­ate speed.

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By Mike Sheldrick

It may be time to retire the old saw about hydro­gen: “The fuel of the future and it always will be.” Despite some dra­matic advan­tages, includ­ing zero emis­sions, and fuel costs that poten­tially could be sub­stan­tially lower than gaso­line, hydro­gen has never been a seri­ous con­tender to replace inter­nal com­bus­tion engines, even though fuel-cell tech­nol­ogy was invented 175 years ago.

While hybrids and BEVs (battery-powered elec­tric vehi­cles) are grab­bing most of the spot­light, nearly all the automak­ers have active FEV (fuel-cell elec­tric vehi­cle) pro­grams underway.

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Fleet Logis­tics has seen the size of its con­tracted fleet reach 137,000 vehi­cles, a new record and well ahead of the company’s ambi­tious growth tar­get for 2014, due largely to new Euro­pean busi­ness from US-based companies.

“It is increas­ingly obvi­ous that we have become very attrac­tive to Amer­i­can cus­tomers as we have an exten­sive Euro­pean net­work and knowl­edge on both the auto­mo­tive and leas­ing sides of the mar­ket. And for com­pa­nies that have exten­sive fleets out­side of their Amer­i­can home­land, we are now the num­ber one choice. They see the Euro­pean mar­ket as one which is very com­plex with a host of dif­fer­ent rules on tax, legal and finan­cial issues but it is one where we are the local experts,” said Fleet Logis­tics CEO Rainer Laber.

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After watch­ing prices surge to record lev­els in the wake of the Great Reces­sion, U.S. used car buy­ers are finally catch­ing a break, with costs tum­bling sharply on most mod­els and likely to con­tinue to slide through 2016, accord­ing to those who track pric­ing trends.

There are a few excep­tions, such as pickup trucks, which have been in increas­ingly high demand as con­trac­tors and fleets rebound along with the econ­omy. But there are great deals to be had on “nearly new” lux­ury cars and a num­ber of other mod­els, accord­ing to such experts as Tom Webb, the chief econ­o­mist for Man­heim, which runs some of the nation’s largest used vehi­cle whole­sale auctions.

READ MORE  about the pric­ing decline