Zones and Customer Visits in Geotab

Zones or “geofencing” can be a very useful tool for employee productivity and is included in the Geotab system. They are specially useful tracking customer visits.

Here is some information about zones and what you can do with them:

• Zones are spots on the map that you know your vehicles are going to be at on a regular basis (i.e HQ, Customers) . You can add as many as you like and tweak it to fit the location.
• When the vehicles are in a zone, their icon will change to a star, and that’s your quick and easy way to know from a glance that they are somewhere you expect them to be.

• If your vehicle is stopped at any location outside of a zone, the system will note what street address they are at. If they are stopped within a zone, the system will display the name of that zone instead.

• Zones can be used to track how long you drivers spend at a given customers and how many time they have visited the customer. This can be helpful in evaluating job costs and scheduling. Please see attached for a sample customer visit report.
• Zones are also helpful when it comes to reports – because we have created reports in which entries change color based on the type of zone a vehicle ended their trip in. Therefore, the zone name is displayed on the report rather than a street address, you can quickly see when they were in a recognized place, and you don’t have to worry about matching up a street address to the client.
• Another thing that makes zones useful is that you can make rules that track your vehicles in and around a zone and get notifications when the rules are triggered. For instance, you can be alerted when your vehicles enter or exit a zone.
  • Many of our clients want advance notice when their vehicle is leaving a customer’s address, so that they can know how far along in their work the drivers are, or so that they know when to prepare the next shipment.
  • Many of our clients have vehicles that go to known areas regularly, but do not actually stop their vehicles. The system does not recognize these as “stops” because the vehicles did not stay still long enough, and did not turn off their ignition. However with zones, they can still get a report that shows when their vehicle entered, exited and how long they spent there.
• You can be alerted if a vehicle spends too long inside a zone -for example, if you have a local Tim Hortons as a zone, you can be alerted if your drivers spend more than 5 minutes there.
• Zones can also be used to dispatch your vehicles to a location by using sending the zone to your driver using the Geotab Drive App.