8 Ways to Cut Your Insurance Costs
An excellent driving record and better driver training for all your drivers means enhanced business, maintaining good relationships with clients, and managing costs. It affects road safety, CSA performance, litigation, and interactions with law enforcement. It’s a pretty simple formula, but one that can make or break your trucking business.
8 Ways to Cut Your Insurance Costs
Did you know driver training contributes to the success of your company by keeping your insurance manageable? How? And what kinds of training are going to cut to the quick of your most common problems the fastest?
First, let’s look at how the right or wrong kind of training can affect your insurance rates.
How training affects insurance costs
The cost of your insurance is based on what kind of risk the insurance company thinks your drivers pose. And that’s based on the frequency and severity of accidents and incidents.
This hinges on the behavior of individual drivers, but every driver is going to affect the whole. That’s the importance of making sure every single driver is getting the same quality and consistency of training, without exception. Consistency is key.
Let’s say one of your drivers starts racking up a few speeding tickets and, even though you are remediating consistently and doing your due diligence, he or she still has a speed related accident and goes to court. With proper documentation of all your training and remediation efforts, your company may manage to exonerate itself legally. But this single driver’s behavior will still affect your insurance rates. So, the main point of driver training is to actually change driver behavior. Only better driving with consistency can help manage insurance rates.
1 – Staying alert
Cover and re-cover topics that deal with signage, distractions, fatigue, and driving in various weather conditions. You can never cover these basics too frequently.
2 – Defensive driving
This will cover topics that affect your most common moving violation issues, such as:
- Traffic signs
- Speed
- Space management
- Following too close
- Lane changes
- Common errors cars make around large vehicles
- Intersections and railroad crossings
- Backing a rig
- Bridges and overpasses
3 – Special safety topics / “Best practices”
This is where you can get a little deeper into specific safety topics like distracted driving. For example, distracted driving training commonly covers cell phones, but how often do you train on handling road rage? The goal is not just to stay legal, but to promote top safety practices. Other special safety topics might include emergency triangle placement and safe route navigation.
4 – Cargo securement
Keep your haul safe. This kind of training will cover cargo door safety and properly securing all cargo. Different loads may require different training.
5 – Night driving
A common cause of violations and accidents is driver fatigue, and fatigue is more challenging in the night hours. Night safety and healthy night driving are paramount.
6 – Hazmat training
If you want to know what an insurance risk looks like, take a look at a semi truck carrying a load of hazardous materials. But your drivers can be trained to handle Hazmat safely, from general awareness of hazardous materials to loading and unloading, securement, and emergency response.
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7 – Maintenance
Trucks that are up to date on maintenance reduce incidents. Topics should include brake safety, axles and tires, inspecting a driveline, troubleshooting vibrations, and winter weather readiness.
8 – Accidents
This is last on our list, but not least. Training should prevent accidents, but when and if they occur you can be the company who knows how to handle them. Properly handle collisions, rollovers, and jackknifing. By the time an incident is happening, drivers shouldn’t have to think. The right reactions should be instinct.
With online training modules, you can get very flexible and specific, and target topics directly to individual fleets and drivers.
Now get to work on your training plan, and start managing insurance costs!
Infinit-I Workforce Solutions offers over 700 online driver training modules to help you cut costs and keep the roads safe. Request a catalog today.