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The fast-growing connected car market promises to unlock new value for a wide range of stakeholders – but only if the customer experience is right. A TM Forum Catalyst is demonstrating how an ecosystem of partners can use advanced data analytics and AI to make this a reality.
Combining physical and digital journeys is the future of connected car customer experience
The fast-growing connected car market promises to unlock new value for a wide range of stakeholders – but only if the customer experience is right. A TM Forum Catalyst is demonstrating how an ecosystem of partners can use advanced data analytics and AI to make this a reality. The global connected car market is growing fast – forecasts suggest it will be worth over $43 billion by 2023, with benefits and opportunities for car manufacturers, telecoms operators, entertainment providers, cities, insurance companies and, of course, drivers. According to analysis from Juniper Research, 775 million consumer vehicles will be connected via in-vehicle apps or telematics by 2023, up from 330 million in 2018. It also predicts that the total spend over connected car e-commerce platforms will reach $265 billion by 2023. Making this a reality requires collaboration between automotive OEMs, network operators, smart cities and payment solutions providers, the research house notes. "The provision of APIs and development platforms that enable third-party development of payment-capable in-vehicle apps is essential to the creation of new and innovative OEM services," Juniper says. To explore these and other challenges and opportunities that the connected car market brings, a TM Forum Catalyst is focusing on creating a personalized connected driver journey that makes use of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, 5G and other technologies. The journey begins Jaguar Land Rover is the Champion of Driver Connect – fueling a personalized customer experience with AI.
“We want to understand how we can improve and simplify the customer experience at the point of purchase, handover and during the ownership journey,” said Richard Ramsden, product strategist, apps and connected content at Jaguar Land Rover.
Catalyst champions pose a real business challenge that they are facing and work with participants to rapidly find a solution. Participants in this Catalyst are Salesforce, Nokia, Cerillion and TechSee. From handover to ownership The Catalyst aims to create a personalized connected driver journey that incorporates proactive diagnostics and cognitive analytics, integrated with 5G-enabled features like mobility services and vehicle telematics. The team is developing three use cases which directly address Jaguar Land Rover’s goals: Within these three areas, the team is addressing several technical challenges. Chief among them is getting a 360-degree view of the customer, which requires giving partners visibility of each other’s data.
Abhi Sur, Global Solutions Lead for Communications Industry, Salesforce, explained: “For example, in roadside assistance, you want the technician to know what the customer’s problem is before they turn up so they can serve them in the right way. “Visibility of data is key to this,” he said, noting that TM Forum’s Open APIs have helped the team to address this challenge. "What we have tried to do is turn a challenge into customer delight,” Sur added.
All three use cases will feature AI and predictive analytics in some way. AI and big data will be used to predict what other services the customer may want to buy, based on not only their own buying behaviors and habits but also via analysis of what others have bought. Merging the physical and digital journeys The technologies are also being used to bring together the physical and digital journeys of the connected driver.
“For instance, how does data from a charging point in a smart city help us to give prescriptive recommendations of what a driver might need on their journey?” said Abhi Sur from Salesforce. “In the third use case, in particular, we are exploring how the physical touchpoints of the car fit into the digital journey.”
The solution features Nokia’s IMPACT platform, which integrates device management and data collection to offer a complete IoT management solution, and its Network Services Platform (NSP), which provides operators with a more efficient way to automate, optimize and assure network services.
Keshu Dubey, Nokia Software Solution Architect, Nokia, adds that: ”The platforms will enable brands to send updates to cars in the same way communication service providers (CSPs) send them to mobile phones. He acknowledges, though, that “some people have concerns about what happens to their car when it is remotely updated so another objective of the Catalyst is to show how hundreds of millions of devices can be managed via Nokia’s platform.”
A team effort Each Catalyst participant brings a different piece of the technical solution. In this project, the variety of participants allows the team to approach the use of AI from two different directions and, in doing so, exploit multiple sources of data.
Sur explained: "Nokia brings in data and intelligence from the device and network, and this can be brought together with the CRM data and intelligence from Salesforce. This is what makes the solution unique and allows us to merge the physical and digital journey."
Cerillion provides the subscription management and charging platform which also integrates with the solutions behind each of the use cases. TechSee’s role is to “demystify” augmented reality (AR) and demonstrate the role it can play in visual assistance for sales and servicing.
The team plans to recommend several additions to TM Forum’s Open APIs, which have been critical to ensuring visibility of data to everyone in the ecosystem. They will also contribute back to the Charging API. Further, one of the team’s most significant contributions back to the TM Forum community will be an ecosystem model built using the digital transformation tool CurateFX, which helped the team to visualize and manage the relationships between the different stakeholders in the project. The team also plans to produce a whitepaper on how the processes developed using the TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM) could be used more widely. To learn more, watch this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019:
