When we get a reward, special pathways in our brain become activated. Not only does this feel good, but the activation also leads us to seek out more rewarding stimuli. Humans show these neurological responses to many types of rewards, including food, social contact, music and even self-affirmation. Rachel Grieve, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Tasmania
Driver safety programs for far too long have been focused on flagging risks and issues and communicating these to drivers.
The Brightmile Manager Portal will identify our customers’ riskiest drivers and their areas for improvement. However, we believe it’s time to move away from just the ‘stick’ and to include the ‘carrot’ in a successful driver safety program. Positive reinforcement, gamification and rewards are vital ingredients to us having happy and engaged drivers with our app and program.
Ongoing engagement also allows us to keep raising the bar to incentivise a positive feedback loop and sustained improvements in performance 🙌
How do we do this?
1. Rewarding safe miles
Using our app, we automatically measure every trip our users do. We assess the performance of these trips against our five pillars of driver behaviour analysis. There are risk, speeding, fatigue, distraction and eco events.
A safe mile for us is each mile a driver does which does not trigger one of these events.
We tally these up for every business journey and let our users know how many safe miles they have done. Our users earn a Brightmile for every safe business mile they do! This is like our equivalent to an air mile.
2. Unlocking trophies
Drivers can also unlock trophies and earn even more Brightmiles by completing certain challenges we set in the app. This could be having your first day with no smartphone distraction or going a whole month with no harsh acceleration (eco events). As drivers unlock each challenge, we keep raising the bar to incentivise continued commitment to safe driving and sustained improvements in performance!
Each trophy will have a Brightmile value, and with each trophy you earn, you will also be accumulating even more bonus Brightmiles.
One of the advantages of developing a software-only platform is that it is possible to make continuous improvements to our product in the form of new releases (helpfully delivered on our behalf by Apple and Google via the App Store and the Play Store). The current trophies are just the first step on our roadmap towards learning from other industries like healthcare, to gamify safe driving and move the needle on collision reduction - so watch this space for new features!
3. Cashing in those Brightmiles for prizes
We also want our drivers to be able to do something meaningful and win prizes with the Brightmiles they collect. This is why we’ve created our BrightRewards program! Drivers can enter monthly raffles, and bigger quarterly prize draws (e.g. to win an experience day).
BrightRewards is fully funded by Brightmile! However, we’re always looking to add more prizes and some of our customers choose to supplement the prizes we provide with some additional ones.
The raffle is designed such that, as opposed to a more traditional leaderboard, it is not just the same, top-performing drivers who are rewarded with prizes each month. Drivers with fewer Brightmiles have less chance of winning, but they just might get lucky, allowing Brightmile to continue to motivate riskier drivers.
4. Giving back
We understand not everyone wants to use all their Brightmiles to win prizes, and in fact, we have found that some drivers are more motivated by altruism! We also believe that together we have a great opportunity to support some fantastic charities - especially those clearly aligned with our mission for safer driving like Brake in the UK. This is why drivers can also donate their Brightmiles to our charity partners, and when we hit certain milestones, we will make monetary contributions to some great causes and projects.
It’s working
I’m glad to say leading with positive reinforcement, gamification and rewards are working in making drivers super engaged with Brightmile and driver safety. As a result of the great engagement of our users and their commitment to safe driving, we have seen vehicle collision frequency rates go down by at least 25% wherever we have been able to measure this with our clients!
All of this means we will continue to dial up these key elements of our driver safety program and keep you posted on all of the great milestones we have hit with our users!
