Meet Groome Transportation

Groome Transportation is a leading provider of transportation services throughout the U.S. This family-owned and operated company with over 85 years of experience provides safe, reliable, and comfortable transportation services to hundreds of thousands of passengers each year across a variety of markets — spanning airports, universities, and hospitals.

The safety of its passengers and employees is Groome’s top priority. As Groome expanded its growing business to 35 offices across 16 states, Groome began evaluating solutions to help it operate safer and more efficiently. Groome is devoted to ensuring the best and safest possible service experience, and it was looking for an AI-based safety technology that upheld that same high standard.

Searching for a reliable dash cam

Rob Carpenter is the Director of Safety and Compliance at Groome. “We employ over 1,200 drivers across the more than 800 vehicles we operate — spanning Mercedes Sedans, Ford Transits, all the way up to coaches. We needed a safety solution that would work across all those different vehicle types to keep our passengers and drivers safe when they travel with us.”

Groome was initially using dash cams from another modern safety vendor to support its safety program. However, poor AI-based event detection and unreliable dash cam connectivity led Groome to consider other solutions.

First, the inaccuracy of this former vendor’s AI-based event detection was problematic for Groome’s leadership. “I reviewed every single video,” recalls Carpenter. “I would say our former vendor got it right about 60% of the time. But that simply wasn’t enough to meet our company’s high safety standards.”

The lack of reliability around its previous dash cam vendor was also a key driver in looking for new solutions. “We had serious connectivity issues with their dash cams,” says Carpenter. “We had one dedicated person working 50 hours a week just to correct unassigned information.”

And when Groome needed support to fix these connectivity issues, delays in response slowed down its entire operations. “It wasn’t just the system — it was the service,” notes Carpenter. “The fastest response time we got from our previous provider was 16 days. The slowest was 90.”

“I was tired of things falling through the cracks.” Carpenter began investigating the potential of switching to the AI-powered safety solution from Motive, formerly KeepTruckin.

Improving safety with AI-powered devices 

After a comprehensive head-to-head trial experience, Groome officially made the switch to Motive. “For us, it was a no-brainer,” says Carpenter.

The first selling point was the accuracy of Motive’s AI safety event detection. When it comes to accident prevention, precision is everything. The Motive AI Dashcam instantly detects unsafe driving behaviors like cell phone distraction and alerts Groome’s drivers in real time. The Motive AI Dashcam is powered by the leading edge AI processor and advanced computer vision algorithms that make this industry-leading accuracy possible. “The accuracy of that detection means less false alerts for my drivers. When the dash cam alerts drivers about a critical event, they know it matters. 

Second was the way Motive helped make Carpenter’s department more effective. “Because of the contextualized and prioritized information I have access to in Motive’s Safety Hub, my team can be way more productive,” says Carpenter. “We don’t have to watch every single video to understand what’s happening — that information automatically appears for us. This efficiency enables us to give that invaluable time back to business initiatives and priorities — like investing in our existing drivers to minimize churn, and coaching high-risk behaviors to reduce accidents.”

Motive’s AI-powered technology handles the heavy lifting when it comes to making sense of safety data, since safety departments already wear enough hats. Motive gives your existing safety department a competitive edge by helping your existing team to be more effective at their jobs. “The amount of time we save is unreal, ” boasts Carpenter.

The final decision factor was the ability to use insights from Motive’s proprietary risk score, DRIVE, to predict future accidents and build out incentive programs. “I’m really excited to use DRIVE as the framework for our ongoing coaching conversations. DRIVE can help automatically determine how often we should have coaching sessions with drivers, and help track our coaching’s impact on performance over time, so we can reward drivers who are improving to reduce churn.”

DRIVE can also help Carpenter’s team gain a holistic view of driver performance over time. “The fact that you can benchmark performance against hundreds of thousands of other drivers is awesome. That means we can objectively understand what actually constitutes dangerous behavior, and get in front of coaching it as quickly as possible.”

Making the safety department 4x more efficient

“My favorite part about Motive is that it eliminates the void between the front line and corporate,” says Carpenter. “Previously, we could never proactively see what was happening on the road — and now, we can.”

Since implementing the Motive AI Dashcam, Carpenter’s team has seen an overall reduction in cell phone usage and interaction.

 “That drastic change wouldn’t have been possible without the AI Dashcam to detect that behavior accurately,” states Carpenter. “It alerted our drivers, and it also gave our safety department the mission-critical visibility we needed to stay on top of modifying that behavior. The automated coaching for my drivers post-trip was a game changer.”

Groome’s principal focus is on maintaining every possible safe conduct and policy measure to protect its customers, employees, and the general public. The partnership with Motive helps make that possible.

“The Motive AI-powered safety platform supercharges my safety department and drives company-wide ROI,” concludes Carpenter. “We can reduce claims, get in front of preventing accidents, improve driver performance, and most importantly: keep all of our passengers safe.”