Why fleets stop using their telematics

Before Emris, one of our co-founders spent sixteen years in the telematics industry, running commercial teams across Europe. The KPIs that filled every week were the acquisition ones: lead volume, demos booked, appointments kept, lead conversion, year-on-year growth. Every one of them pointed up. The one KPI that nobody put on the wall was churn, and churn was quietly climbing.

On paper, churn has tidy explanations. Selling to the wrong customer. Poor onboarding. Slow support. All of them true somewhere, and all of them easy to assign to someone else's department.

One question, every office

So we went looking. Our co-founder visited every office in the business and asked the same question in each: what is the real reason customers leave? The answers came back as a mix of explanations, excuses and blame, but one of them kept surfacing, in different words, in different countries.

"The customer doesn't see value."

That answer is more interesting than it sounds. Telematics is sold on the promise of a healthy return on investment. These platforms have hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of subscribers, large recurring revenues and healthy margins. The systems work. The data is accurate. And yet the person paying for it, a few months in, cannot point to what it has done for them.

It isn't the system. It's time.

What is missing is not a feature. It is the hour a fleet manager does not have.

Getting an answer out of a telematics platform means knowing which report to run, running it per vehicle or per driver, exporting it, lining it up against the payroll file or the planning sheet, and then reading the result carefully enough to spot the thing that matters. That takes time, and a level of familiarity with the data that most operators are never given the chance to build. They have vans to keep on the road.

So the reports go unread, the dashboards go unopened, and the value that is genuinely sitting in the data is never seen. When the renewal comes round, "we don't really use it" is an honest thing to say.

The lightbulb

The data was already there. It had been paid for, collected, stored and reported. The only thing standing between the customer and the return they were promised was the work of interrogating it.

That was the moment Emris started. If the customer will not come to the data, bring the answer to the customer. Let them ask a question in their own words and get the answer, with the trips and records behind it, in the time it takes to read a sentence.

What Emris does

Emris is an AI chat tool that sits on top of the telematics you already have. Ask any question about your fleet, your drivers, your schedules or your expenses, and get a full answer: no running several reports across several screens and cross-referencing them yourself. Emris tells you what you want to know, when you need to know it, and what to do about it.

It works alongside your existing provider, by uploading the reports you already download or by connecting the provider's API. Your telematics keeps doing what it does. Emris makes sure you finally see what it has found.

Who we are

Emris was set up by Alex, Carl and Ger, three co-founders with over 50 years' combined experience in telematics and enterprise software, and a shared frustration with watching good data go unused. It is an Irish-owned AI software company, built from real experience of the industry, for the real problem behind the churn number nobody wanted to look at.

We are your AI fleet expert. Just ask.