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However, William Fattal, co-CEO at Romex, says that it is still possible to contact employees while they're driving after calls and texts have been blocked by the app: "If you've got a driver who is in, say, High Wycombe, and is travelling to Bristol, and it turns out that the person he is supposed to be meeting isn't there, you don't want him to travel all that way for nothing because it's a waste of a day.
"[When someone calls the employee, the system] will send a verbal alert instructing them to pull over and call the office back when it's safe to do so."
The DDP app costs £50-£60 annually per phone regardless of platform (depending on how many are sold to each business) or is slightly more expensive if acquired on a monthly plan. Fattal speculates it could also bring discounts from insurers once it is established.
Case Study: Michelin's blanket phone ban
Tyre giant Michelin introduced a company-wide ban on staff making or receiving phone calls during business journeys in late 2009. The firm's UK commercial director, Malcolm Scovell, tells BusinessCar how he did it.
"The guy running our car fleet at the time put the evidence in front of me and showed me that it's about 10 or 20 times more likely for an accident to be serious if you were on a call or made a call within the last 30 seconds, so [the ban] was something of a no-brainer.
"We had rules in place anyway that deterred people from making calls while driving - keep calls brief, don't stay on the phone for longer than five minutes - that sort of thing. But when you've got a soft policy of that nature it's very difficult to police.
"I brought in a small team I'd heard about called Crash Course [a road safety presentation specialist supported by Staffordshire blue light services and other local organisations]. They do an hour and a quarter's session, which leaves people in no doubt about who road safety affects. I followed that up with a message saying 'when you leave this room, we do not want you using your phones in the car on business journeys'.
"We had only one case after that where we had to take disciplinary action. I'm certain that 99% of people don't do it - they pull over and ring the caller back.
"If you had a two-and-a-half-hour car journey [before the ban], you might, on average, spend an hour of that on the phone, but I wasn't asking the staff to achieve the same volume of phone calls. As a side issue, we monitor our phone bill. We also changed the phone contract, so there was hard, irrefutable data on the phone usage.
"The people I was the most worried about were the front-line regional sales managers because they're on the phone all the time. We got around that by setting up technology to improve phone conferencing and getting much more organised at phone calls.
"Unless the guy at the top makes the decisions, the guy on the ground will think, 'that's just HR, I need to get the job done' and ignore it. Companies are completely wasting their time unless someone with full authority is behind the programme. People will find excuses if they can - a phone call for work will quickly extend to answering your wife when she rings to ask if you can pick up a pint of milk on the way home."
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Business Car Magazine © 2020 | Business Car is part of NS Media Group.
