How can call center agents leverage connected car data to help customers?

March 25th, 2024

The success of your connected cars’ call center services will largely boil down to two things: providing clear information to the call center agent, and quick, excellent service when the driver needs it. So, how do you achieve this? At WirelessCar, we are currently working on a new call center client (CCC), a case management tool that agents use to log, monitor, and update customer interactions. As part of our Call Center Services product, it is aimed at meeting the increasingly complex demands of the automotive call center service landscape.

Meeting drivers’ requests, and providing proper context for call center agents

There are numerous reasons for why drivers choose to use call center services in their connected cars. Some calls are information calls, with the driver requesting an alternative route or where to find, say, a local hotel or café.

However, a lot of calls are made by drivers who are in distress due to a breakdown, collision, or other emergencies. Then there is automatic collision notification, where the vehicle occupants may not even be responsive because they might have been knocked out by the airbag, for example. These situations require swift, correct actions from the call center agent. That, in turn, requires a proper context for the agent to work with, presented to him or her in the clearest way possible.

Today, WirelessCar’s Call Center Services allow call center agents to receive static vehicle data, vehicle position, and vehicle status: whatever information the connected car and the OEM provides following an emergency call. In most cases, the agent will receive the car’s last few positions, and see where it has traveled and what direction it is heading in.

What we are doing now, is to build upon our experience, as well as that of OEMs and assistance providers, to create an even more user-friendly and capable call center client. One of the most important aspects of this work is to look at the information context provided to the call center agent, and how we can improve it.

female agent working in a call centre

How your call center client can help streamline service assistance

When receiving a call from a connected car, the service agent will know certain things: where the vehicle is, what kind of vehicle it is, what speed it is driving at, the number of occupants, what direction a collision came from, to mention some examples. But that provides a less than complete picture, for both the agent and for the emergency services that may have to be called to the scene.

What can we do to help provide – and clarify – the necessary context for the agent?

First, it is about streamlining the information. What does the call center agent need to know immediately? What do they need to know as they are talking to the customer?
Second, how is this information presented to the agent? Simply flooding him or her with connected car data will not make it easier for them to provide the right service assistance.

For these reasons, we have decided to completely rewrite the web-based application of our WirelessCar Call Center Client. That includes a data visualization structure that is currently unique within the automotive industry. Instead of listing fields of values, yeses and nos, we're translating the connected car data into clear images wherever possible.

Turning connected car data into better call center services

The call center agent has the tough job of contacting the emergency services. Those emergency services will typically only send a very limited number of vehicles and personnel per incident, get on the scene, and then request more help if needed.

However, if the call center agent can see that there are four people in the car, that two of them did not have seat belts on, that airbags have been deployed, and so on, then that can make quite a difference in a critical situation. It is a level of information detail that you would want to provide as clearly as possible, so that the agent can grasp the situation immediately and at-a-glance.

That said, this still depends on how much data an OEM is willing to send to the connected car cloud. The richer the data set, the more elaborate the information. We will continue to have this conversation with OEMs, and keep developing our products and solutions so that we can put the OEM’s connected car data to the best possible use.

Turning connected car data into clear and useful information means that we have to make certain decisions, such as what to present, and how and when. As for call center services specifically, they require us to approach the whole operation from many different perspectives:

  • What real-world use cases can we learn from, now and in the future?
  • What are the call center agents’ skill sets? How can we best serve, even improve, their expertise?
  • What do the data flows look like, and how can we streamline them further?
  • How can we improve the user experience among both drivers and agents?
  • How do we ensure cybersecurity in every market and situation?
Collision data - Call Center Client

Creating the best possible call center client for your connected cars

Since its initial launch over ten years ago, our WirelessCar Call Center Client has proven itself to be very popular in the market. With our new update, we sought to give it an even more modern look and feel. UX expertise, combined with our 25 years of connected car data and digital service experience, has allowed us to create a call center client that is both comprehensive and straightforward. In order to better capture the real-world use of the current system, we visited large call center operations in several countries around the globe.

Through greater data mapping and data visualization, we can make more use of the connected car data at our disposal, and utilize it for even greater digital services. Future use cases will contribute to our WirelessCar Call Center Client improving further still.

By having the call center service agent’s workflow in mind, we can facilitate their work, and thus help provide better user experiences for drivers, too. Drivers who will then want to use their connected car services more, and likely remain loyal customers to the OEM that offers them.

Curious about WirelessCar’s Call Center Services? If you have any questions, you are welcome to reach out to me via the email address below. Make sure to also read my related call center services article, as well as other related articles here on the WirelessCar Insights Blog!

Guillaume Ouellette
Product Manager
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