Will Jones
Photo Courtesy of EMKAY
When you call a fleet management company at 2 a.m. because one of your drivers is stranded on The 405, you are not in the mood for hold music.
EMKAY knows this. The company has built its entire operation around that exact understanding: that in fleet management, every second of silence on the other end of a line has a cost. It is a principle EMKAY has been refining since 1946, when it became the first privately held fleet management company in North America. Eighty years later, it is still privately held, still answering the phone, and still posting numbers that its competitors have not come close to matching.
The Itasca, Illinois-based company recently received a 2026 Global Recognition Award for Customer Experience. This recognition puts hard data behind what EMKAY’s clients across Los Angeles and throughout North America have long experienced firsthand.
The Numbers Tell the Story
EMKAY’s average response time is 9.6 seconds. To put that in perspective, the industry average is nearly a full minute. The company’s Maintenance Department has a call abandonment rate of under 1 percent and an average hold time of 11.3 seconds, roughly 10 times better than most competitors report. These are not aspirational targets. They are documented, operational metrics produced and maintained by a workforce that is entirely EMKAY’s own.
That last point matters more than it might seem. EMKAY runs its domestic call center support entirely in-house, with no outsourcing, no third-party contractors, and no knowledge gaps introduced by unfamiliar staff reading from a script. Every person who picks up the phone is an EMKAY employee, trained in EMKAY’s culture, and accountable to EMKAY’s standards. The result is a consistency that outsourced models cannot replicate structurally.
The Maintenance and Accident Management Departments are available around the clock, every day of the year. That 3 a.m. call from the stranded driver? Someone answers it. Not a voicemail system, but a real person. EMKAY’s No-Voicemail Policy is a company-wide commitment that live human support is always within reach, regardless of the hour or the complexity of the situation.
More Than a Service Provider
EMKAY’s service model covers a wide range of fleet needs, including vehicle leasing, maintenance control, fuel management, accident management, safety solutions, telematics, and license and title services. What actually sets them apart is how those services are delivered. Dedicated Strategic Account Managers work closely with clients to develop tailored recommendations based on specific fleet needs and long-term goals. The support teams don’t just field calls. They dig into each client’s operations, flag savings opportunities, and act more like a trusted partner than a vendor on the other end of a ticket queue.
Support is available in English, Spanish, and French, reflecting the practical reality of serving LA’s richly diverse communities and businesses. The company’s fleet dashboard and mobile applications give clients real-time visibility into their operations, tools that complement the human support infrastructure rather than replace it. Together, they form a service environment where clients are rarely left guessing and never left waiting.
“EMKAY exemplifies what it means to build a service culture from the ground up, and its response times, in-house accountability, and proactive client engagement set a standard that the industry should study and follow,” said Alex Sterling, a spokesperson for Global Recognition Awards.
A Rigorous Recognition
The Global Recognition Awards process is not a popularity contest. Nominations go through an initial screening by a panel of industry experts, evaluated against criteria including innovation, leadership, and service excellence. From there, shortlisted applicants are scored using a rigorous, standardized framework designed to fairly compare performance across very different types of organizations. The methodology is designed to reward documented performance, not perception.
EMKAY’s results across every measured dimension of customer experience made it a clear recipient in this cycle. Its metrics are consistent, verifiable, and well above the industry baseline. What is most telling is not the speed of response or the low abandonment rate in isolation, but the fact that those numbers have been built into a company-wide culture and held there, year after year, call after call, across every fleet they serve.
In an industry where the gap between what companies promise and what they actually deliver is often considerable, EMKAY has spent nearly eight decades quietly closing that gap, one answered call at a time.