Are your EV charging stations ready to be rated or reviewed? In these early stages of moving towards widespread EV adoption, it can be all too easy for a brand to get stuck with a poor reputation, says David Cornish at Techniche.
The availability of EV chargers remains the biggest anxiety reported by EV drivers, or would-be EV drivers. This is driven by the EV community’s real-world charging experiences where public chargers are regularly out of action for weeks at a time.
The EV community is small and tech savvy, sharing their charging experiences on apps, forums, and social media. Good experiences, as well as bad, are visible for all to see.
In the UK more than one in three EV drivers use consumer charging apps such as ZapMap or PlugShare to find their next charge.
These apps can drive business to you brand and chargers, but they can also drive customers away.
Drivers are much more likely to leave a review of a negative experience than a positive one. That’s why is essential that you know which of your chargers are out of action, why they are out of action, and how you can get them back up and running as quickly as possible. If a single charger, location, or brand is shown to be anything less than reliable or safe, then EV drivers will avoid it, and not come back.
Chargers, locations and brands that deliver reliability and a great customer experience will be the winners in this rapidly evolving market.
Why so much downtime?
Charge point management systems are great at monitoring and managing the day-to-day operation of all your chargers.
What these systems do less well is handle charger errors, whether that’s a temporary loss of communications or a terminal hardware failure.
Errors are logged for a helpdesk to monitor, triage and process. This is a manual process which usually results in a flood of emails between various teams who may – or may not – be able to help.
It can take hours, but more likely days, just to get the right people or team notified for the specific issue at hand. And at this point, no one has even visited the charger itself.
While this is going on, all that consumers can see is that the charger is down and they can’t charge. The likely result? The EV charging operator or owner’s brand gets another negative review on one of the major charging apps. The EV charging industry is struggling to keep up with maintenance on the relatively small number of chargers that are in the ground right now. As charging networks expand, this problem is going to grow exponentially if maintenance continues to be an afterthought.
Techniche CMMS for EV Charging Infrastructure
Our focus is the automation of the maintenance process.
Techniche CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) integrates with all types of information platforms, such as charge point management systems, to get notified the instant there’s an issue with a charger.
Information about the failure, including the vendor-specific error code, is used to automatically select the right action for each issue-type and automate as much as possible – removing the need for helpdesk agents to get involved in everyday decision making or communication until it’s necessary. And because the right teams are notified at the right time, and given the information they need to resolve the issue, the charger is quickly back in action. This means your EV charging station is ready and waiting for the next customer, and all set to help your brand earn another 5-star review.
Next steps
If you’d like to learn more about Techniche CMMS for EV charging infrastructure, request a call or a product demo with one of our team.
Or if you’d like to read more of our blogs, head to the resources pages. Our top pick is 7 reasons CPOs need a CMMS.