Someone rings about something one of your vehicles did three weeks ago. You can pull that trip up and watch the vehicle move along its exact route, with a speed chart beside it . Speed complaints turn on that chart.
Without that, the conversation is your word against theirs. The driver says he was doing forty. The caller says seventy, through a junction near a school, on a street the van was never meant to be on. You either argue or you pay.
The part that decides whether you can answer at all
The replay is the easy part. The question nobody thinks to ask a supplier is whether the trip from three weeks ago, or three months ago, is still there to replay. Ask how long they keep it, and in what form.
We keep history for the length of the contract rather than a fixed retention window. A one-year contract keeps a year. A five-year contract keeps five. It stays searchable in the platform rather than archived off to somewhere you have to ask us for.
That matters most for the complaints that arrive late, and the late ones are the ones that catch you out. Insurers come back weeks after an incident. A resident complains once, then again, then mentions it to the local council. By the time anyone puts it in writing, the trip is old.
Finding the trip while they are still on the phone
You want to do this while the caller is still on the phone, not after an afternoon of digging. 1. Pick the vehicle from the asset list. 2. Pick the date the complaint names. 3. Pick the trip that covers the time they gave you. 4. Play it back along the route and read the speed chart against that time.
Most of the time that either clears the vehicle or tells you the caller is right. Both are useful. Knowing early that your driver was wrong is cheaper than finding out from a solicitor.
What the replay does not prove
The replay settles where the vehicle was and how fast it was going. It does not tell you who was driving. Scoring and history sit on the vehicle , and drivers are managed and assigned to vehicles on a separate tab. The name behind the wheel at 07:20 that morning comes from your own rota, not from us. For most fleets that is fine, because you know who had the van.
When the same vehicle keeps coming up
If you find yourself replaying trips for the same vehicle month after month, you have stopped answering complaints and started managing a problem. Each vehicle carries a 0-100 score and a letter grade built from harsh braking, harsh acceleration and harsh cornering, with the fleet's own aggregate score alongside it.
Put one of the 20+ report types on a weekly schedule and it lands in your inbox without you asking. Then you know whether the complaint was one bad morning or the way that vehicle gets driven every day, which is a different conversation to have with the person driving it.
Book a 15-minute walkthrough and bring the questions you would ask any supplier, including how long they keep your history.
Chris Bartolo, Yipii IoT and Mobility