Industrial internet of things (IIoT) provider Samsara announced on Tuesday that it is reimagining its platform by gearing it more towards providing an Amazon-like experience for its customers.
Consumer expectations built over experiences in the ecommerce market are now crossing boundaries, with people coming to expect services that provide them with greater visibility into operations – including the B2B trucking segment. Companies delivering fleet management solutions are now feeling the pinch to step up their solutions and cater to the rapidly evolving market.
“As with everything we do, our customers are the driving force behind this redesign. The previous design was quite popular, but as we onboarded new types of customers and added features, we found opportunities to make our users more productive,” Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s executive vice president products and marketing, told FreightWaves.
Over the past year, Samsara has onboarded thousands of new customers across a variety of industries and geographic markets, helping the company’s managers gauge expectations across the board and infuse those insights into upgrading the platform. What resulted was a platform that provides simple, intuitive tools for fleet managers to help them stay on top of their operations by monitoring the stakeholders within their value chain.
Customers’ feedback helped Samsara zero-in on design principles that were key – a unified platform, intuitive design, and a platform built for teams. “We’ve been beta-testing the new design with customers and heard overwhelmingly positive feedback – they’re telling us that it is faster, easier to navigate, and fits all of the different users within their organization, from safety to dispatch to compliance, maintenance and management,” said Sekar.
Talking to customers helped Samsara differentiate the needs that were specific to fleets. For instance, some managers liked to use reports to track operations, while some were inclined to use real-time maps to spot their assets. To add flexibility to the platform, Samsara incorporated both ideas, allowing managers to look at either a report or collapse the tab to track assets on the map.
Sekar mentioned that the most immediate changes to the platform were the new navigation and the noticeably bigger maps available on the web dashboard. “On our mobile apps, the most-requested new feature is viewing dashcam videos on the go, helping customers monitor the safety of their drivers from their smartphone and respond to safety events instantly,” he said.
The new dashboard is designed to be the central hub for all services, helping teams to access key workflows and get full real-time visibility into fleet operations. Features are grouped to make it easy for stakeholders to track equipment, safety, compliance, dispatch and maintenance.
“Minutes matter to our customers, whether they’re a safety executive for a global transportation company, or a fleet manager at a local construction site,” said Sekar. “Our new software makes it faster and more intuitive for them to quickly and easily find what they need in order to improve the safety, efficiency and sustainability of their operations.”