Life cycle management of digital services for connected vehicles
Traditionally digital services in vehicles were chosen by (or provided for) the first vehicle owner, at the time of the initial purchase. These services tended to remain with the vehicle throughout its lifetime and stay relatively static. Today, there is a growing focus in the automotive industry on maximizing the value of the vehicle during its entire life both from a revenue and sustainability perspective. This development requires digital services to become a lot more dynamic than they have been and to have full control of the life cycle of digital services. This is where Subscription Management comes in, and the many benefits it brings to enable dynamic lifecycle management.
Like most connected devices today, vehicles need to be upgradable and meet changing customer needs. Customers expect personalized experiences and have an increasing demand to access digital services, regardless of whether vehicles are owned, leased, or used through a mobility provider. To secure customer attraction, not only for the first owner, but all owners and users, the digital services need to evolve.
Successful and dynamic lifecycle management not only relies upon the provider’s ability to offer a portfolio of attractive services, but to maintain and improve the breadth and quality of these services. Compared to most other car functions, connected services are, in a sense, living products. Customers are increasingly accustomed to effortless updates and will expect nothing less of their connected vehicle services to stay loyal. A service that is not updated or managed to meet customer expectations is bound to become obsolete very quickly. To realize dynamic lifecycle management there are three cornerstones needed.
Over-the-air updates (OTA) is the wireless delivery of new software and firmware to vehicles and their ECUs.
Provisioning is the process of remote configuration and activation/deactivation of digital services in the vehicle.
Digital Service Management is the process of managing the market offerings of digital services. This is what Subscription Management supports.
Subscription Management is WirelessCar's product for digital service management that organizes and man- ages vehicle manufacturers’ portfolio of digital services to ensure the right market offering towards the right target group. Our product makes it easy for vehicle manufacturers (OEMs) to manage digital services for their vehicles and customers throughout the entire vehicle life cycle. The product manages the relations between services, users, devices and vehicles.
Subscription Management provides a management portal where OEMs can set up whichever digital services they want to provide. Thanks to its unique vehicle rule engine, offerings can be tailored for specific markets, vehicles, models, or any other vehicle criteria. The digital services offered are displayed in the form of product variants, containing one or more services, to which the customer can subscribe.
OEMs can define their offers and the entitlement rules that make it possible to filter out available services based on vehicle capabilities, market, user, or organization. Because customer preferences, legal and technical requirements can influence the availability of digital services in different markets, this level of customization is key. The sales administrator can also easily set up product variants per market and define everything from sales items, prices, discounts and customer-specific price lists. Service offers can be tailored to meet targeted customers, for example, by offering sales items based on vehicle characteristics and market specifics. All in all, to ensure a purpose-fit design of the go-to market offerings.
Subscription Management handles the entire commerce process of the services, such as subscribe/unsubscribe, expire, renew, upgrade/downgrade, inactivate, and terminate. The Subscription Management solution sends activation and deactivation commands to the selected process that is used for provisioning the subscribed services. This is done either with in-vehicle on-board units or with the cloud-based ecosystem. Subscriptions can be initiated and activated in different ways.
For example:
Activate default subscription Default subscriptions for the vehicle are activated during its manufacturing process.
Pre-order subscription The customer’s choice of services is included in their new vehicle and activated upon purchase.
Purchase subscription The customer purchases or activates the subscription through the web shop.
Fleet subscription Services are automatically activated for a particular vehicle as it is added to a fleet.
Subscription Management enables you to monitor and view statistics related to service use and attractiveness. This will benefit both sales and marketing as well as R&D organizations as they will gain insights into what plays well on the market and helps improve offerings and operations further.
The following example illustrates the solution principle for setting up plans.
Our Subscription Management product comes with multiple integration APIs:
Lifecycle event Subscription information and order basis.
Master Data Integrations to populate Subscription Management with vehicle and customer data.
Customer portal API that exposes the service plans towards an end customer portal.
Provisioning API that sends service activation and deactivation commands to the cars by integrating towards a provisioning process.
Vehicles today have the capacity of being continuously upgraded with technical capabilities during their entire lifetime. To manage digital services that are under constant change will become increasingly more important as the complexity of the vehicle increases. Thanks to Subscription Management, you will be in control. Subscription Management is based on our long and varied experiences of cultivating OEM telematics solutions from the ground up.
Compared with other solutions on the market, our product has a clear focus on the specific nature of digital services for connected vehicles.
Our OEM-facing interfaces enable you and your partners to build the user experience you want to offer your customers.
Your key business systems – product information systems, customer relations management, and tools for customer support – can benefit from the value-adding data from our products.
Our professional services get you off to a good start tackling a global implementation with all the local variations.
