RAC drives for digital with Microsoft Azure
- Summary:
- New connected services based on IOT technologies provide a way for the roadside assistance provider to keep up an ongoing dialogue with members.
Buying a car these days is a tricky business. Along with all the usual considerations around make, model, fuel consumption and the like, buyers also need to wade through a stack of software-driven ‘infotainment’ and safety features. With today’s connected cars, they’re effectively buying what amounts to a souped-up smartphone.
Some features are popular with drivers, others less so. A mid-2015 survey by automotive research firm JD Power shows that 20% of new car owners never used around half of the technology features measured in the study during the first 90 days of ownership. But more recent research around monetizing car data, conducted by strategy house McKinsey, finds that on a global basis there are three features that stand out for consumers as worth paying for: networked parking, predictive maintenance and vehicle usage and monitoring.
The UK’s RAC, which claims to be the world’s oldest motoring organization, has its headlights trained on the latter two features as it pilots new services for customers designed to drive roadside recovery into the digital age.
The man behind the wheel is Nick Walker, who joined the RAC in 2015 and steered its February 2016 acquisition of vehicle diagnostic specialist Nebula Systems. This brings to the RAC technology that enables it to get access to the data generated by vehicles’ in-car electronics. Combined with the RAC’s existing expertise in telematics, he says, this capability enables it to take a ‘deep dive’ into what’s going on with a particular vehicle, to diagnose faults and to monitor driving habits.
If customers want to take advantage of the RAC’s new connected services, all that’s required is the installation of a ‘black box’ in their vehicle. It works with any vehicle that dates from 2003 or 2004. For older vehicles, a compatibility check is required. Says Walker:
It’s quite non-intrusive. It just monitors what’s going on in your car and identifies faults and problems, just like a workshop diagnostic tool. But it’s able to do other things, too. It can monitor your driver style, so it can give you information on how you can improve to drive safely or to save fuel. It will monitor if your vehicle is involved in an impact and issue an alert containing details around what happened in that incident - information that is often used in insurance scenarios to support or deny a claim. There are also features around location and journeys, so if you’re sometimes a business driver, you can classify journeys as business or private mileage.
This information is taken from the device over the mobile network and fed into a platform that the RAC has built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. It’s then analysed so that relevant reports and information can be fed back to the driver.
A common report, for example, is that there’s a fault in the vehicle that needs investigation - and part of the analysis process involves interpreting information and delivering it back to the driver in a way that’s actually useful to them, says Walker:
It’s pointless us telling you, ‘Your vehicle is reporting fault code P0203 and you need to do something about it. You’d think we were mad. For most drivers, there’s not even much point in us pointing out a fault on a drive train. But if we tell you, “If you stop driving now, we can come out and fix this fault for £150, but if you carry on driving, there’s a real risk it’s going to end up costing you a lot more’, then that’s information that you need to have and can benefit from. So one of the big learnings we’ve had from building out this platform and loading it up with vehicle data is that we really need to work data to a level that we can give the driver something very meaningful, rather than another piece of data in their life that they just don’t understand.
Scaling up
So far, around 15,000 vehicles are connected to the platform. These are a combination of fleet vehicles belonging to RAC’s corporate members and those belonging to individual members. Right now, the majority belong to the first group, which has long used other RAC telematics-based services, with just a few thousand individual members piloting the service so that the RAC can better understand the interactions that are most useful to them. The business model for this second group has yet to be decided: it won’t be a prerequisite for joining the RAC, Walker confirms, as some drivers don’t want to be tracked and monitored in this way and wouldn’t value the services:
So we see it as optional, but as to whether it’ll be an add-on service or a different level of membership for those that want it - well, we’re still working out how to package all that.
One thing that is clear, he says, is that scaling upwards from today’s 15,000 vehicles to reach far more of the RAC’s 8.5 million total membership will involve some important technology considerations, particularly when it comes to advanced analytics. So the RAC’s talking to Microsoft about how to bring machine learning and stream analytics into the equation. It’s also in discussions with vehicle manufacturers on how to get data out of new vehicle models without having to install black boxes in every vehicle, a task that would clearly raise some serious logistic challenges as services are rolled out at scale. Finally, there’s work underway to bring the RAC’s recommended third-party garages and workshops into the picture too, so they can be alerted in advance to an incoming vehicle and any faults the RAC has identified remotely with it, before it turns up on their forecourt.
The RAC’s partnership with Microsoft is important, says Walker, when you take into account the full spectrum of applications and systems required to run a set of fully ‘end-to-end’ services for drivers. As well as the advanced analytics currently under discussion, and the Microsoft Azure platform for vehicle data, the RAC is also using the Azure IoT Hub and Microsoft Dynamics for CRM.
The Internet of Things (IOT) has the potential to create new relationships between the RAC and its members, says Walker. It’s a far cry, he says, from the days when the RAC would only have two types of conversation with its members in any given year: the membership renewal conversation and the conversation that followed a breakdown situation:
I’d go as far as to say that our core mission isn’t really just about roadside assistance anymore. It’s more about keeping drivers on the road, so a specific engagement triggered by these connected services really only ends when that vehicle is out and about on the roads again. And, in the background, those connected services help maintain an ongoing dialogue with drivers that runs throughout the year.