How Safety Directors Should Use AI & Automation To Prioritize People

By now you’ve seen the sparkles. 

Versions of this emoji — ✨ — are everywhere: email providers, social media platforms, smartphone apps and more. 

What do the sparkles signify? An Artificial Intelligence tool is available for you to use. 

AvatarFleet is no different. Wherever you see sparkles (ours are purple, of course), the Avatar Assistant is at your service. 

Our goal with the Avatar Assistant AI and our automation tools is to help Safety Directors like you and your team automate time-consuming administrative tasks so you can prioritize people. 

Here are a few challenges we’re helping you tackle with AI and automation now, and how will be expanding these tools in the near future.

Challenge: Compliance & Safety

A major part of your job as Safety Director is compliance — in other words, good record management. 

Typically that means complying with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) regulations. 

Within A-Suite, we’ve automated many elements of compliance by engineering away risk. For example, the platform prevents you from completing the onboarding process until all FMCSA 391 requirements are met. You physically can’t hit the Approve/Hire button if you have not correctly completed every step in the process.

Another example: The step for ordering a Motor Vehicle Record (MVR) can’t be unlocked until the MVR release form has been signed. Through automation, your Avatar Assistant won’t let you get yourself in trouble. 

Compare this to the paper world, where motor carriers often have a checklist stapled to a manila folder that someone in the safety department is responsible for checking off as they go down the list. Unfortunately, where humans and manual processes are involved, so is human error. Paper goes missing and that puts your company at risk. Do you think the plaintiff attorney cares that you put in the file yesterday but your trainer took out the MVR before the road test and forgot to put it back? We’ve seen that exact example happen in the real world. 

Challenge: Time-Consuming Clerical Work

In our experience, time spent doing and overseeing clerical work reduces the amount of time you can spend on higher value activities, like driver coaching or safety training. 

The Avatar Assistant helps you focus on the most important tasks and helps your team be much more efficient with tools like the driver’s license reader. After simply uploading an image of a driver’s license in A-Suite, AI reads and processes the data, eliminating a ton of tedious data entry for you or someone on your team. Similarly, with the Avatar Assistant the medical card review process takes just a few moments rather than multiple steps like it used to. 

These reductions in clerical work improve your team’s compliance effectiveness. That translates to less potential for human error, safer drivers on the road and man hours you can redirect to more useful tasks within your company. 

Imagine what you could spend those on: more time recruiting safe drivers and more time coaching drivers who exhibit unsafe behaviors — all in service of bringing drivers home safely after every major trip. 

Challenge: Not Answering the Phone is Throwing Money Away

We’ve observed that most transportation recruiting departments have a live telephone answer rate of 10% or less and take nearly a week to respond to candidates on social media. 

When we took a client's live answer rate from 8% to 87% they netted out two more hires a month with zero additional advertising dollars. So before you go give more money to Indeed - how often are you answering the phone?

You can cash in return on investment in recruiting in one of two ways: 

1. You can keep your ad spend the same and hire more drivers.
2. You keep your number of new hires the same and save hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on advertising.

We have proven that drivers will interact with the Robo Recruiter by engaging in a phone screen and asking FAQs about the job. The Robo Recruiter collects pertinent information from candidates over the phone, records and transcribes it and sends you, the human recruiter, the results. From there you can easily scan the transcript and address issues quickly without having to listen to every single voicemail. 

This is a low risk area to explore because 90% of recruiting calls go to voicemail today, and drivers typically don’t leave voicemails anyway. Frankly, you don’t have much to lose.