Agero Insights

Consumer preference for self-service roadside assistance requests continues expanding rapidly. We've been welcoming this sea change with the continued introduction and enhancement of an array of new digital intake options, across phone, web and smartphone app, and voice assistant channels. Among this growing array of self-service channels, mobile apps are the most preferred.

For consumers who are accustomed to using their mobile devices to order food, request a ride, or deposit a check, the mobile roadside experience is fast, easy, and overall preferable to speaking with an agent by phone. We make it easy for our clients to create a seamless digital roadside experience directly in their own mobile apps using Agero’s Client API.

Client API

Digital roadside requests through our client API continue growing at a rapid clip. For both our clients and their customers, client apps offer significant benefits over other request channels:

• 100% digital – Vehicle and personal details are prefilled with information from the customer’s profile, helping to speed up the request process. The vehicle location is captured by the phone’s GPS, and all breakdown information is submitted digitally, which ensures the service provider receives clear and accurate job data. After the request is submitted, the customer receives follow-ups by text message. However, if an event does require further support, full integration with Agero’s platform allows a seamless transition to an agent-assisted experience.

via Gfycat

• Seamless brand experience – Clients own the end-to-end user experience with roadside requests integrated into their native apps. Consumers get an additional useful feature in the client app, enhancing app stickiness, and increasing engagement with the brand.
• Emerging interactive channels – Our API isn’t just for mobile apps. Clients can create innovate user experiences by integrating roadside assistance into their smart device programs, such as Alexa skills for Amazon Echo Auto.
• Higher NPS – Customers who request roadside assistance through a mobile app report NPS 10 points higher on average than those who use non-digital channels, and 5 points higher than those who initiate the process by phone and transfer to a digital channel.

Recent Improvements

• Dispatch scheduling – Many customers, including the nearly 35% whose cars break down at home or at work, may not need immediate roadside assistance, or may prefer to request assistance for a specific time. We now offer the ability to schedule a dispatch through our mobile API for a future time slot. Customers are given the option to choose among a list of available time slots but cannot choose times that already booked up. One hour before the selected time, a digital dispatch is created and assigned to a local service provider.
• Drop-in UI – For clients who want to validate customer demand for mobile roadside requests before investing in UI development, we now offer a web-based user interface that can be displayed directly in their branded native app. Customer information is pre-populated in the roadside request interface to enhance the user experience.
• Improved sandbox – We moved our staging environment to Amazon Web Services to take advantage of its superior reliability and stability. Mobile app and API testing is now available at any time without prior notice or scheduling, giving our clients’ dev teams more flexibility.

We are excited about the possibilities as more customers request roadside assistance through our clients’ mobile apps. We continue to invest in improvements and new features for our client API – stay in the loop with our blog to learn about them as they are released.

In the meantime, if you are thinking about how to encourage consumers to use your digital channels, check out some best practices here.