AM Awards 2016 - Best Fleet Operation

Swansway Group’s fleet director Sarah Eccles heads a team of 25 staff focused on delivering service that exceeds the expectations of contract hire and fleet customers and the vehicles’ end users. Thanks to this team, fleet volume, revenue and profit have broadly doubled in three years.

Swansway believes that by moving fleet sales from its dealerships into a centralised, dedicated team, it ensures fleet customers do not get pushed down the queue in favour of retail customers. This is reflected in service level agreement scores from customers and reinforced by being a preferred supplier to many of the largest contract hire and leasing companies.

Swansway measures its fleet team against set KPIs, such as a 20-minute response time to a request for a quotation and a three-hour deadline from receipt of order to placing the order.

The team includes local business development managers, each dedicated to a manufacturer brand, who seek to build relationships with local enterprise, and an online brokerage called U Choose, which is seeing a rapid rise in personal leasing.

Swansway has recently invested £500,000 in improving its fleet function, which included moving the fleet team to a building adjacent to Swansway’s head office, with PDI and valeting facilities, an open plan office with space for future expansion, undercover storage for 200 vehicles and a further 150 outside. In addition, it has more than doubled its number of transporters and is investing in digital handover and ‘how-to’ videos, which are emailed to end-users ahead of their car’s delivery.