TowingBossPro Blog — Roadside Assistance

Roadside Service for Commercial Accounts: Fleets, Dealers and Property Managers

A single fleet account can send you more roadside calls in a month than a hundred individual drivers. Delivery vans with dead batteries, rental cars with flats, a dealership lot full of cars that sat too long, an apartment complex whose residents keep locking their keys in their cars. Commercial roadside work is steady and repeatable, but only if you make it easy for the account to work with you.

Who Counts as a Commercial Roadside Account

Turning One-Time Roadside Customers Into Repeat Customers covered keeping individual customers coming back. Commercial accounts are the same idea at a larger scale. Typical roadside accounts include:

• Local businesses with service vans or delivery vehicles.
• Car dealerships and used car lots.
• Rental and car-share operators.
• Apartment complexes and property managers.
• Schools, churches and organizations with vehicles.

The common thread is repetition. Each of these sends you similar calls, often to the same locations, with similar vehicles. That predictability is what makes commercial roadside work valuable, and it is what lets you serve it more efficiently than one-off calls.

Set Them Up as Accounts

In TowingBossPro, commercial accounts keep their calls and invoices under the account. Every jump start, lockout, tire change or tow you run for that business is grouped together, so you, and they, can see the full picture.

Save their repeat locations: the yard, the lot, each property they manage. That makes intake fast. The dispatcher picks the account, picks the location, adds the vehicle details and the call is on the waiting list map.

Capture the account's own details too: who the contacts are, any purchase order or approval requirements, and how they want to be invoiced. Put that in the account notes so it is there for every dispatcher, every time.

Agree on How Calls Are Approved

Before the first call, settle who can request service and what happens when a call grows. Some accounts let any driver call. Others want the fleet manager to approve every call. Write the rules in the account notes so every dispatcher handles it the same way.

When a roadside call turns into a tow or extra work, an estimate with online approval sends the new price to whoever approves for the account. That gives them control and gives you a record.

Agree on response expectations as well. An account that expects a truck within a certain time needs to know what you can actually deliver, especially at night and on weekends. Being honest up front avoids the slow erosion of trust when expectations and reality do not match.

Billing That Works for Them

Accounts usually do not want to pay each call on the spot. Card on file and auto-billing let you charge on whatever arrangement you set. Invoices name the vehicle on every call, so a fleet manager can match each charge to a specific van. Sales tax is handled on the invoice, and payment follow-ups go out on anything overdue.

The customer app lets the account see invoices, pay online and manage their card without calling your office.

Clean invoices win renewals. A fleet manager who can hand their own boss a clear, vehicle-by-vehicle record of what you did that month is a fleet manager who keeps calling you. Messy invoices make them look bad, and they will remember that.

Choose the Alerts They Want

A fleet manager may not want a text every time one of their drivers gets a jump. The vehicle's driver probably does. Alert choices in the customer app let the account decide what they receive, while the driver on scene still gets the on-the-way and arrival texts when you send them.

When an account's driver is the one stranded, make sure the call has that driver's mobile number, not just the office line. The on-the-way text and the live map only help if they reach the person standing next to the vehicle.

Review the Account Regularly

Look at each account's calls periodically. A van that needs a jump every week probably needs a new battery, and telling the fleet manager makes you look like a partner, not a vendor. An apartment complex with many lockouts might want a package plan. Reports by category show you which accounts are growing and which are slipping.

The next article covers fitting roadside calls into a dispatch board that is already full of tows. For accounts, dispatch and billing together, see the TowingBossPro roadside assistance software page.