Powering Up: Four Strategies to Elevate the Customer Experience at Public EV Chargers Today

As the electric vehicle (EV) market grows, improving the customer experience at public charging stations has become a top priority for the industry. During the 2024 Forth Roadmap Conference, I outlined four critical areas where the EV charging experience can be significantly improved. These focus areas will enhance customer satisfaction and play a key role in accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles globally.

1. Build world-class customer-facing software

A positive customer experience starts long before the driver plugs in their EV. Creating intuitive, informative, and secure customer-facing software is essential. Software must provide real-time updates and guide users before, during, and after charging.

• Before Charging: The app or website provides information on charging products and pricing, identifies options for charging station locations, specs, and amenities, ensures clear navigation to the charging site, and facilitates account registration and any membership enrollments.
• During Charging: A smooth interaction between the EV, the charger, and the network is crucial. Software facilitates the EV-charger-network "handshake", ensures payment processing, and offers real-time updates on the battery state-of-charge. This is governed by a series of critical, yet highly technical standards, which should remain "invisible" to the customer. Customers don't care (rightfully so) whether it's OCPI 2.2.1 or ISO15118 that is responsible for their successful charging session, so long as they get one!
• After Charging: Drivers need charging records and receipts, easy access to their account for updates and subscriptions management, and timely customer-support for any follow-up questions or issues. All those services and features are offered through software.

For company leaders in the space: think about your favorite airlines app; or shopping website; or online banking platform. If the customer experience with your charging software is not at least as good as leading examples in other industries, then it’s simply not good enough. Customer-facing EV charging apps, websites, and platforms need to not only “execute” EV charging, but also “educate” first-time users about EV charging. It’s critical they serve both functions seamlessly.

2. Expand roaming capabilities

Roaming enhances access and increases optionality for EV drivers, by connecting charging point operators ("CPO" aka charging networks) with emobility service providers ("eMSP" aka mobile charging apps).

Broadly, there are two flavors of roaming:

• Full Roaming: Charging app allows drivers to (i) locate chargers and see their live status, (ii) start/stop a charging session, and (iii) pay for charging seamlessly. Full roaming requires technical integration through open standards, primarily OCPI.
• Light Roaming: Charging app allows drivers to (i) locate chargers and see their live status only. Light roaming can be done via a simpler API integration.

In addition, there are two methods of doing roaming:

• Direct Roaming: In this model, the CPO and eMSP create a 1:1 roaming connection. This direct integration enables a specific charging network to be accessible through a specific app, ensuring a seamless charging experience for the EV driver.
• Hub Roaming: A more expansive solution, this model connects multiple CPOs and/or eMSPs to a roaming hub. The hub acts as an intermediary, allowing a CPO to roam with several eMSPs, and vice versa. This model of roaming is significantly easier to scale up.
• Both direct and hub roaming are governed by established technical and commercial agreements, ensuring data privacy and protection.

When a CPO or eMSP decides to undertake roaming, it’s critical that they communicate how roaming works to their customers, answering questions like "who is responsible for what?" and "who do customers contact in case of issues?" Ensuring that the roaming process is smooth and transparent is key to the customers' overall charging experience. Designing a positive and pleasant customer roaming journey is not trivial, and it should not be an afterthought.

3. Mitigate vandalism

Vandalism, especially cable theft for copper, has become a significant issue for public charging stations and is now likely one of the top-five reasons for negative customer experience. This is particularly problematic in urban areas.

A charging station might witness vandalism 1-5 times in the span of one month. The financial impact of cable theft is severe: while thieves might gain $20-$100 for the copper, replacing one stolen cable can cost operators anywhere from $500 to $5,000. Addressing this issue requires both business and policy interventions:

• Business Interventions: Charging station manufacturers should consider producing chargers with safeguarded cables, which are encased inside the charging box. This is especially important for DC fast chargers.
• Policy Interventions: Public charging should be treated as critical public infrastructure, with adequate incentives and funding for maintenance, and enhanced punitive measures to deter theft and vandalism.

If left unchecked, vandalism could hinder EV adoption and the expansion of public charging networks in communities that need it most. The goal is to ensure universal access to public charging by protecting the infrastructure.

4. Emphasize retail

Just as the EV itself, or frozen pizza for that matter, public EV charging is consumer goods. Innovation and optionality created by the variety in business and pricing models for public EV charging should be encouraged, because not all customers want the same thing. While standardization is good to drive costs down and to streamline the customer experience, overregulation can stifle innovation and become a barrier to EV adoption.

Finding the right balance is key.

• Pricing and convenience: The price of public charging must reflect the value of energy delivered, amenities on-site, and convenience, while remaining competitive with traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) fueling.

USEFUL TIP: How can customers compare the cost of EV charging to ICE fueling? Simply multiply by 10. As a rough rule of thumb: $X/kWh is equivalent to $10X/gallon of gas; for example, a $0.4/kWh for EV charging is equivalent to $4/gallon of gas; this bakes in the energy efficiency of the vehicle type and model. Suppose ICE owner pays $3.5/gallon for gas then switches to an EV of equivalent size and specs. If they pay less than $0.35/kWh for EV charging, then they are likely saving money on fueling; if they pay more than $0.35/kWh, then they might be worse off.

• Innovation: The market needs to strike a balance between technical standardization and business flexibility, to allow different customer offerings to flourish.
• Policy and regulations: Policy and regulations are key to accelerate market innovation and facilitate consumer options. They are most effective when they incentivize the “what”, and let the market figure out the “how”.

Conclusion:

Improving the public EV charging experience in the short-term hinges on advancing customer-facing software, expanding roaming capabilities, protecting stations from vandalism, and encouraging innovation in retail pricing. By focusing on these four areas, the industry can not only meet but exceed the expectations of EV drivers, building trust and promoting wider adoption of electric vehicles.

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