Innovation and customer focus are themes which come to life as soon as you step into the state of the art facility that is Rivervale Leasing’s Brighton headquarters. 在聪明的钢铁和玻璃立面, Rivervale’s HQ houses a drive-in Bosch service department with covered parking, a used car sales operation, offices for the leasing team and a smart Starbucks branded café area.

The high-end dealership feel that differentiates Rivervale Leasing from so many other vehicle leasing operations is reinforced by the fact that all staff, including Chief Operating Officer Vince Pemberton appear dressed in matching navy blue sweaters and white shirts.

Describing the background to the Business, Vince says, “We consider ourselves to be the John Lewis of the car leasing industry. We use them (John Lewis) as a gauge so that the customer always comes first. There is a statement above the door that says, ‘Do it the right way, do it the Rivervale way’.”

Rivervale Leasing became involved with ODO trying to find a company that they could work with to find a niche in the fleet management market. In their opinion fleet management has predominantly been for big fleets in big businesses and Rivervale wanted to work with a company that would understand the benefits of fleet management if you run anywhere between five and fifty vehicles. Research told them that many fleet management programs were only addressing themselves to very large fleets and that wasn’t where the need was in the market. Day to day businesses need support with keeping on top of areas like health and safety and duty of care.

Rivervale have business customers like engineering firms who are very good at what they do, i.e. Engineering, but they are not good at managing vehicles. They aren’t big enough to justify employing a dedicated fleet manager. Things happen like service intervals get missed because individual engineers out on the road are busy or they forget to get their vehicle serviced and this can lead to breakdowns. The result of that is an engineer who can’t get to his or her appointments, which is costly for the Business.

With ODO in a fleet management role, Rivervale Leasing can help prevent that happening. ODO is like an iPhone, it can do much more than we need, but what we need to do, ODO can do. It has a really clever traffic light system which makes it easy to manage someone’s fleet. ODO is friendly and workable for our type of environment, so for us as a leasing broker, it was the right fit.

The relationship between Rivervale Leasing and ODO is more than a simple customer-supplier arrangement as Vince explains, “We have worked with ODO to develop the app. Research with our customers tells us that a lot of businesses don’t do driving licence checks and the app needs to start with the driver. Of course, the ODO platform includes driving licence checks. Without that, as the director of a company, if someone doesn’t tell you they have been banned, where does that leave you? ODO even takes this a stage further and the app will ask the driver to confirm their fitness to drive.”