Improving your roadside assistance

Breakdowns happen. They are stressful, inconvenient and sometimes costly. But in Australia we are lucky enough to have some affordable and helpful roadside assistance providers that are available for callouts whenever we are in need; whether that’s in the outback or the CBD at peak hour. Part of becoming a driver is accepting the reality that things can go wrong—accidents, breakdowns, flat tyres. And when they do, our response is to call someone. 

So if you are a customer—who do you call when your car breaks down? Your roadside assistance provider. And if you are the insurance provider, what do you do if all of your repair vehicles are already busy? Or someone is broken down in a remote place? Businesses have to make a number of important considerations in the operations of their roadside assistance service, with many moving parts. For this reason, the best way to keep track of everything is a visualisation method. 

With Next Mile’s partner, HERE Technologies, it is possible for roadside assistance companies to solve issues efficiently and deliver a premium customer service. Follow the use case below to explore how the HERE Technologies suite of products can work for you.

How the HERE Tour Planning API and HERE SDK are perfect for incident response

Let’s imagine that a driver breaks down during rush hour and they manage to pull into the emergency lane on a multi-lane freeway, they open their roadside assistance app and place a request for help. That particular day, you may have a number of other breakdowns across the city and it becomes hard to manage the geographic allocation of your fleet. Response times for customer calls are delayed due to the inefficiency of your fleet management system, and the poor geographic allocation of vehicles and mechanics is causing unhappy customers. You start to feel like jobs are slipping and customers aren’t getting the support they need, your service offering suffers.  

Though, it doesn’t need to be this way. With HERE’s Tour Planning API you can ensure your fleet vehicles are managed properly. For instance, the Tour Planning API enables you to access dynamic job scheduling, to cater for however many breakdowns occur during rush hours. Using a multi criteria evaluation process, the API is able to optimise the entire fleet and each vehicle’s job allocation based upon distance, live traffic, service type and other factors. 

When you couple the power of the HERE Tour Planning API with the HERE SDK, you will enable your drivers to take advantage of HERE’s advanced location services that support their journeys, which includes customised maps, routing, in-car turn by turn navigation, a map designed for fleets, historical traffic patterns and more. The HERE SDK is one of the most sophisticated offerings on the market, enabling your team to navigate to an incident location more efficiently. 

Routing 

Furthermore, with HERE’s Routing API the driver will be directed to the job in the quickest and most practical way. When people are stressed and panicked about a breakdown, or they are unfamiliar with the area; it can be hard to pinpoint exactly where they are and how you can get to them. In order to do this efficiently, you can integrate HERE’s Geocoding and Search API  within your customers interface so they can send a GPS location to the switchboard and direct the driver right to them.

Planning and business intelligence 

Planning for the future is an important part of businesses being able to secure profits and make allowances for growth and change within the business and wider economy. Just as important, is ensuring you can grow your capacity to meet customers needs and remain competitive. 

Using HERE Technologies you have the benefit of accessing historical data for post-trip analysis; allowing you to interrogate your performance and plan for the pain points for your business. For example, what particular days and times do you have a higher number of callouts? Where are they most commonly occurring? What’s the average wait time customers experience? Then you can start to analyse where you need more service people and fleet vehicles, on which days and what times. 

From a health and safety perspective you can leverage the data to evaluate your drivers. You can look into their driver behaviour and schedule rest times for longer shifts, to comply with industry regulations. 

This in turn, is more likely to help you become a better roadside assistance business as you better serve your customers and care for fleet drivers—by developing a more efficient, safe and tailored service. 

How Next Mile can help you 

With our technology partner HERE Technologies, Next Mile can offer you discounted access to the HERE Technologies product stack, including the API’s mentioned in this article. 

The HERE Technologies Location Services API’s can assist roadside service businesses with improving their customer offering, including: points of interest, dynamic route sequence capability and even road surface, speed limits, elevation and turn by turn navigation.  

To get started on your roadside assistance improvements, reach out to our team.