Fleet portal for AutoGuru
Coast vehicle service, repair booking site secures major deal for Ampol customers
VEHICLE servicing and repairs booking site AutoGuru has ventured into the fleet management sector – securing a major new deal with Ampol.
AutoGuru, founded on the Gold Coast by Eden Shirley, has partnered with Ampol, formerly known as Caltex Australia, to create a fleet management maintenance portal.
Ampol customers using the company’s Starcard get preferred rates on servicing and repairs using AutoGuru’s quoting technology as well as faster authorisation.
“When a customer goes into a say Bob Jane or Bridgestone they pull out their Starcard and the service provider knows they need to get an authorisation to do that job,” Mr Shirley said.
“Because we have this cool quoting tech that can calculate the cost of servicing online, we have built a portal that the service providers can log into that has all the pre-negotiated pricing in it and then they can create a quote and submit it to our fleet controllers online and then we can quickly approve that and it takes half the time it used to.
“That customer pays on that card and we pay the service provider. We joke around like it is the ANZ falcon like we are monitoring all the transactions that come through.”
Mr Shirley said there were more than 70,000 businesses using Starcard with one mil
lion cards in the marketplace.
He said the cards usually were used to pay for fuel, however Ampol’s was different.
“You have always been able to pay for other services, par
ticularly maintenance, tyres, windscreens and batteries,” he said.
“Ampol’s network was big – it includes all the big dealers and servicing chains.”
Mr Shirley said while Ampol was technically not a fleet management organisation, it offered all the same services.
He said AutoGuru was aiming to gain other big clients for its services.
“The vision is to centralise fleet management because the challenge for the service provider is they can get seven to 10 fleet cars a day and that could be five different companies,” he said.
“They have to pick up the phone and get authorisation and although we only have one partner on this platform now theoretically in the future we could add other partners and the service providers have one place where they can go and get authorisation so it’s quicker for them.”
AutoGuru gained Ampol as a customer after going through an accelerator sponsored by the company.