The other day I spent some time with Chris Iveson, director of maintenance for Challenger Motor Freight and the 2015 Canadian Fleet Maintenance Manager of the Year. We had a really interesting interview that covered a lot of ground.

You can look for a full profile of Chris in the August issue of Truck News but in the meantime, I wanted to share one of his more interesting insights, concerning his view that drivers are a maintenance department’s customer base. It’s one thing to say that, and quite another to live and breathe it every day. We’ll have video from this interview up at Trucknews.com shortly but for now, here’s Chris in his own words describing his philosophy that drivers are a maintenance department’s true customers. Over to you, Chris…

“Our customer in maintenance is the driver. If our mechanics take good care of the equipment, that in turn will allow our customer – which is the driver – to go out and service our customer. We understand the driver is our customer, so we have things like surveys.

“Every time a truck comes into the shop, we put a five-question survey into the truck. We have the driver rate his experience – how he felt the service was – and then we rate ourselves. We measure ourselves against it. It becomes one of our KPIs that we look at on a weekly basis.

That’s big for us. I don’t walk across the parking lot, ever, without having a conversation with a driver. We make sure that we’re fully engaged. We put on barbecues for them that are maintenance-sponsored barbecues and we let them know we’re here to support them.”