By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
July 24, 2024
Driver safety is paramount in the world of fleets, with millions of dollars spent each year on programs designed to reduce distraction and reward safe driving. However, changing driver behavior is easier said than done.
Many drivers are reluctant to have their behavior monitored and criticized, and efforts by fleet managers to punish risky behavior often fail to make things safer in the long run. On the other hand, leading with the carrot instead of the stick has shown promise in getting drivers to self-correct and drive more safely.
That’s one area in which companies like Brightmile have managed to make a real difference, using an app-based rewards program to reduce collision rates, fuel bills and CO2 emissions at the same time.
As a leader in technologically advanced business driver safety and sustainability, Brightmile uses a smartphone-based app to gamify and reward safer driving. By engaging drivers and empowering managers with their cloud-based app, they’ve reduced collisions by up to 75% while reducing fuel consumption and carbon footprint by up to 15%.
To learn more, we interviewed Dom Saunders, Brightmile’s Founder and CEO. Here’s what we discussed:
What makes Brightmile the world’s leading driver safety and sustainability program?
This is because we’re a truly global business. We set out around six years ago with this vision, and since then, we’ve been working with some of the world’s leading multinationals. People use our application in around a hundred countries and counting. It’s essentially a way for big enterprises to deploy a global solution across all their drivers. Of course, it’s also localized, so wherever you are in the world, you get your local solution reflecting local speed limits and driving cultures.
We started as a safety platform looking at driver safety and behavior. When we did a proof of concept, we realized that if you encourage drivers to drive in a slower, smoother, and safer way, you’re also burning less fuel. Obviously, with the sustainability agenda being top of mind for our B2B clients, that eventually became part of our value proposition. It’s clear now that safety and sustainability come together in how we change driver behavior.
How does the program work? How does it benefit fleets?
The fleet benefits focus mainly on driver safety and behavior, aiming to reduce collision frequency first and foremost. Brightmile is an application the driver can download onto their smartphone or tablet from the App Store or the Play Store. The app uses the sensors in the smartphone to understand the driver’s behavior, which we then use to engage the drivers to try to improve their performance. That takes us into the world of gamification and driver rewards. So, the primary benefit to clients is that it lowers the collision rate. Changing driver behavior can ensure safer driving performance and lower collisions in the long run.
Changing driver behavior brings other benefits to our B2B clients as well. If drivers drive more safely and smoothly, they see benefits across fuel consumption, vehicle wear and tear, corporate liability insurance costs, uninsured collision damages, etc. As an app-based solution with a relatively cost-effective rate, it’s easy to justify the expense. Brightmile delivers an excellent return on investment.
We’re in a dangerous time regarding driver safety. How can Brightmile improve safety for our readers’ fleets in these somewhat dangerous times on the road?
One statistic we’ve had in mind from the beginning is the data point that around 94% of collisions are caused by driver behavior. That means, if addressed correctly, 94% of collisions are preventable. That’s where we’ve gone into the world of behavioral science and gamification. The Brightmile application looks like the Fitbit or personal fitness application for business driving. We’re thinking about how to take driver performance data, display it very clearly to the driver, get them thinking about it, and then engage them daily to think of ways to drive more safely.
There’s a lot of competition these days for our headspace and our time. Safe driving is not something people are always thinking about, so it’s a challenge. We studied the leading gamification experts worldwide to examine the best practices of personal fitness and other applications. How can we get inside the head of the driver and make sure they’re thinking about how to drive more safely? So that’s the foundation of what we do.
I think one reason it’s a scary time for road safety is smartphone distraction. We’re seeing people on the road looking at their phones or social media, which is risky behavior. Ironically, what we can do with a smartphone-based telematics solution like Brightmile is monitor smartphone distractions, one of the five behavioral pillars we’re trying to improve. By downloading the Brightmile app to your driver’s phones, we can then know if they’re engaging with their phone while driving and eliminate that behavior down to zero.
Another one of our behavioral pillars is speeding. We work with our clients to understand speeding, set appropriate targets, and bring the overall speed down. We’re also trying to bring a more contextual understanding of where risk occurs to the telematics world. In addition to whether you’re exceeding the speed limit, we look at where the speeding occurs. We differentiate between speeding around a stop sign junction, a school zone, or a risky bit of infrastructure, where you might have a higher probability of causing a collision. For that behavior, we would trigger a separate risk event in the Brightmile app.
We’re looking to be very contextual and intelligent with our analysis of risky behavior, using that data to get inside the driver’s mind and engage them to drive more safely. It can be a bit of an adversarial relationship with the drivers when your telematics solution is the stick beating the driver. Brightmile wants to be on the driver’s side, the carrot rather than the stick. We look to engage the drivers with data points and interventions that make sense from their perspective.
Tell us about the history of Brightmile. How did it come about?
We’re headquartered in London, UK, but we came out of the InsurTech incubator of one of the world’s global insurers, AXA Insurance, about seven years ago. So, we started looking at things from a fleet insurance perspective, focusing on driver safety from the beginning.
We wanted to know if the conventional telematics solutions were moving the needle regarding reducing collisions and addressing driver safety in the best way. All the research we did – the focus groups, the ethnographic research with fleet managers or health and safety managers –suggested that while these are great operational tools, something was lacking on the driver safety side. We had to figure out how to get more contextual with telematics, give insightful data, and gamify and engage drivers so we could meaningfully improve their behavior.
We soon found a sweet spot with large enterprises and multinationals because they have vital health and safety cultures. If you drive there, they want to do everything possible to avoid a collision. They have a duty of care that they take very seriously in the workplace. As a new tech business working with some of the world’s biggest enterprises, we had a bit of a baptism of fire, but it helped us to refine and get our product up to enterprise-grade quite early. We then quickly scaled globally because big enterprises like Heineken and Diageo internally referred us from market to market, where they felt they had a burning platform for driver safety. That’s part of why we’re now a global solution working in over a hundred countries.
How does Brightmile differentiate itself from the competition?
There are many different business drivers in different vehicles doing different jobs with different companies, and there’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all telematics solution for all those different needs. Where Brightmile differentiates is that we’re an utterly software-only solution. There’s no hardware required at all. When fleet or health and safety managers hear telematics, they think they like it. Still, it will be a hassle–shipping the boxes, installing, and uninstalling them, and dealing with the vehicle or the supply chain.
With Brightmile, there’s none of that. We deploy our application from the cloud to the driver’s device, managed from the online dashboard. So, everything gets done at the click of a button, making it more cost-effective. It’s a B2B SaaS model that is all about the driver. We do have the management dashboard that delivers management insight, but our programs start with engaging the driver to change their behavior. We’ve developed a few different configurations based on the preferences of our clients, some of which incorporate the stick. But where possible, we always focus on the carrot.
We have an inbuilt driver rewards program called Bright Rewards. If you drive safely based on agreed targets with your management, you’re automatically given bright coins within the app. The drivers then accumulate their coins, which they can use to win prizes in the app. We also support some charity partners so drivers can donate their bright coins to specific charities. It’s all about engagement and making the drivers feel like they’re being rewarded meaningfully for good behavior.
The program side of our work is also a big differentiator. All of our clients get a dedicated program manager from the beginning through concept, hopefully to a multiyear deployment. You’d be working with your program manager with our structured driver safety program.
Now, we have a way to serve drivers from a more traditional perspective, which we’re doing with our new partnership with Geotab. Drivers with the Geotab device can now have the Brightmile application powered by Geotab data. So, if you have a fleet using Geotab, we can offer the Bright Rewards program based on that data via your Geotab reseller.
Can you share a success story or two?
We’ve been working with our flagship client, Heineken, for three or four years now in about 15 global markets and counting. Our average frequency reduction in collisions with them is 40%, a statistic we’re very proud of. The Heineken program is one where we first realized the power of rewards and gamification. We even work with them in some markets where, because of workers’ councils or strict data privacy regulations, Brightmile had to be a voluntary program, and the behavioral data had to be anonymized when it came through to the managers.
Some people wondered whether telematics could work in that scenario, so we had to dial up our driver rewards. We built a dedicated merchandise store so drivers could exchange their BrightCoins for Heineken merchandise. That’s something we can now offer to any of our B2B clients. We can offer the same productized experience where clients can contribute their merchandise or prizes, and the drivers can use their safe driving points to buy those items in an inbuilt store in our app. And despite those very challenging conditions, we got excellent signup and utilization rates among the drivers, which significantly impacted the collision rates.
Another success story involves an extensive North American Telco fleet where we measured fuel consumption as part of our proof of concept. We realized that when drivers who used the Brightmile app drove slower and smoother, it led to a 15% reduction in fuel consumption, translating directly into around a 15% reduction in CO2 emissions. That’s when we realized we could add the sustainability element of our value proposition to go hand in hand with safety.
