Our associates work around the clock to get drivers back on the road after a breakdown or accident. Fortunately, we don’t need to do this alone. Agero is part of an incredible ecosystem of roadside service providers, repair shops, dealerships, and software companies who, along with our clients, work together towards this common goal.
Vehicle storage and the costs that accompany it are an inescapable reality for automotive insurers. Accident scene management partners with deep expertise and sophisticated technology can help improve FNOL time and improve the rate of vehicle recovery at the accident scene before municipal responders arrive. Mobile telematics with crash detection automatically notifies the insurer at the moment of a crash, taking that decision out of the consumer’s hands and making accident scene recovery more likely.
A few months ago, we highlighted Agero’s On Demand App, enabled through VIVR (Visual Interactive Voice Response). Since 2014, we have seen the preference for self-service roadside assistance requests nearly triple, so we introduced our On Demand App on our roadside platform in 2018 as a way to deliver a digital experience for our clients who do not have their own branded native app.
However, among the self-service channels, mobile apps are the most preferred. For consumers who are used to using their mobile devices to order food, request a ride, or deposit a check, the mobile roadside experience is considered faster 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 Mobile API.
Mobile API
We have seen digital roadside requests through our mobile API grow by 50% over the past 12 months. For both our clients and consumers, there are 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.
- 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
We’re constantly looking for ways to make it easier to use our mobile API, or to add more features that our clients can integrate into their mobile apps. Here are some recent releases:
- 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 mobile 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.
At Agero, we are always working to better understand the trends that impact the roadside industry. Connected vehicle technology has been gaining traction over the past 20 years and is pervasive in new vehicles. This technology has interesting and exciting implications for the consumer automotive experience, impacting everything from roadside to infotainment to concierge services.
At Agero, in order to best service millions of consumers every year, we spend a lot of time and research staying on top of consumer trends. Since 2014 we have seen the preference for self-service nearly triple. Recognizing this shift, our team has been hard at work developing new channels and enhancing existing channels in order to provide a better consumer experience.
After 45 years in the business, we know what it takes to define roadside at scale. We know how to enable easy digital intake, empower agents with the tools they need to assist customers, digitally dispatch to a curated network, provide tracking tools for the consumer and the provider, and layer on reporting and analytics needed to optimize. Delivering seamless service requires tremendous expertise and powerful tools and resources to meet the range of requirements and conditions that arise every day. To create this service, we built Agero Roadside Managed Services on three key components:
Agero Dashboard enables visibility and reporting for your roadside events. With this tool, your team can better understand how your customers are using roadside and review their experiences. This empowers you to truly leverage the power of roadside as a loyalty building tool.
Accident scene management is complex. Coordinating a recovery for a non-drivable vehicle requires expertise and consideration. Key factors include ability to obtain accident details and data, equipment and expertise to safely transport vehicle, and measures and controls to ensure vehicle are delivered to preferred location. The challenge in accident scene management is that, for about half of accidents, this process must be completed first from the accident scene and then again from the storage facility.
The challenge of delivering roadside support is the complexity and coordination involved in connecting the customer, the dispatcher, the provider and program sponsor. This team of individuals and businesses must come together for a given event. The more coordinated they are, the more efficient and effective the process, enabling a better customer experience. Orchestrating a disparate set of stakeholders to deliver a seamless experience under changing conditions is no small feat. It is critical that we have the right tool set to enable transparency, to field, service and review each roadside event.
By combining Agero’s Accident Scene Management (ASM) processes with Agero’s Driver360® smartphone-based automatic crash detection algorithms, insurers are able to save up to $3 Billion of unnecessary costs while also improving the policyholder experience. In fact, this was the theme of a keynote address that Luis Quiroga, our VP of Product Strategy and Marketing, and I gave at the TU Automotive Connected Car Insurance show in Chicago this fall.