[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to the Charging Conversations podcast, brought to you by EV Connect. Charging Conversations is the go to audio stop for electric vehicle charging businesses. I'm your host, Cassie Layton. Each episode, I talk to different leaders in the EV charging industry about innovations, challenges and successes that drive the industry forward. Whether you're just getting started with your EV charging business or you're an industry veteran looking to learn about the latest trends, you're in the right place. One favor if you like what you heard, please like, subscribe and share this episode. It helps others find the show. Today I'm talking to our cross functional team of seasoned EV Connect experts, Paco Aguirre, senior director of customer Success, Sarah Elhibi, customer engagement manager and Nick Millar, director of product. I talked to her panelists about the challenges of scaling an EV charging business and the five key functions all EV charging networks need to tackle, build, charge, manage, maintain and grow. We've got lots of insights to cover in one show. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Paco, Sara and Nick.
So, as we think about the structure for our panel discussion today, I'm going to ask our panelists questions about these five key build, charge, manage, maintain and grow. We're going to have a great conversation today with these panelists and feel free to jump in. So let's start with build again. The build stage is about encompassing the site selections, incentives, hardware procurement, installation, commissioning. And so I'd like to start first with you, Paco. Paco, can you please share some of the innovative practices that you've seen from charging networks in terms of site selection, procurement and especially commissioning?
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Well, yeah, Cassie. So our partners leverage the option of evconnect being hardware agnostic, and that is what helps them decide what's the best hardware to deploy at their sites based on their business needs or their customers needs. And additionally, when it comes to commissioning, I see our customers save time and money by leveraging our pre commissioning process in which stations are pre commissioned at the manufacturing facility, making the commissioning process very, very simple. So, as our customers and partners are selecting their locations, they have a wide portfolio of manufacturers to work with, and they get to see which ones have that pre commissioning option, which will help them reduce their costs and also increase the speed at which those stations get commissioned.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Great. Thank you so much for sharing, Paco. Sarah, I'd love to hear from you because I understand that starting a new network can be very complex. I'd love to understand from you the critical steps in getting a new network up and running smoothly.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: The very important thing is that you need time and resource commitment. You need the team to be subject matter experts at what they're doing. So the team members need to do recruitment, they need to do tech work. You need to also be aligned as a team. You have to have check ins with the team, even if it's a 15 minutes, like how's the project going? It is. Or a 30 minutes like weekly to see where the project is going. So time and resource commitment is very important for this.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: That's good to know. Kind of setting up that structure for success and making sure that you have those time and resources allocated out. And when thinking about the process for running a network, well, how quickly can you actually stand up a network?
[00:03:52] Speaker C: So I've seen with customers it can take months, but I have streamlined the process, to be honest, and we can make it go live within six to eight weeks.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: That's pretty incredible. From zero to launch. I'd love to talk a little bit with Nick. Nick, can you tell me from a product development perspective some of the features that you're seeing that are table stakes today? And what are maybe some of the new features that you're starting to see networks begin to add in? Thinking about it under this build framework.
[00:04:24] Speaker D: It'S a great question. So I think the base camp in my mind is having chargers that are on the open standard. So OCPP, there's a couple of different flavors of that, but ensuring that it's on OCPP is really critical. I think the thing to realize is as your network grows, you're going to evolve what hardware you want to work with. You're going to evolve what partners you want to have. And the open standard is what unlocks the ability to do that evolution. If you get locked into a closed framework, you end up becoming a lifetime customer, whether you want to or not, of that sort of a system. So having that base technology layer is really what enables you to grow the way you want to grow and to be flexible as you learn and iterate in your business model. So that's the base camp in terms of more advanced functionality that we're seeing customers start to really think about utilizing at this build stage. It's really about how do you create a repeatable, deployable chargers into the market. And so there are tools that can be leveraged to really help set you up for success in that way and to as much as possible standardize the process because you don't want to have to reinvent your processes every new site that you're installing. So Paco alluded to some of the pre commissioning tools that can be available. So that is ensuring at the factory floor, the chargers are set up and configured in a certain way to ensure a standard performance on site. And then the other really important thing is when your technicians are on site, ensuring they have access to commissioning tools so that they can do end to end testing, ideally with real EV's before that site goes live, so they don't have to come back for a second visit. It's all about minimizing that time on site and ensuring that they leave the site that they know that that's going to be a successful charging installation is going to work for the drivers that are going to use those chargers.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Nick, and thank you to our panelists. It's very clear that process and operations are paramount during this stage, and leveraging technology to ensure that those are a seamless process. So we talked a little bit about build. I'd love to move on to chart. So at the charge phase, again, this is all about the driver experience, and we like to think about it holistically, because drivers are discovering charging stations through a variety of ways, including your own app, or through a roaming app, or through their vehicle interface. All these different experiences to lead to your station, and that's how they find them, how they charge at them, how they pay at them. And so this also, this phase extends to the driver support. If there is an issue, there's a lot of new EV drivers that are out there and they're still trying to figure out how all of these stations work and how some of the apps work as well. So I'd like to start with Paco at the charge phase here. Paco, the driver experience is crucial for success of any network. Can you speak to the best practices to ensure that seamless driver experiences, including the use of the app and how.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: To handle payments drivers, they expect it to be simple and reliable. And I see regulation is also driving towards offering multiple payment methods in different locations to enable that simplicity and payment methods that customers or drivers are familiar with. So it's a really good best practice to familiarize yourself with those regulations. So as you are building your sites and deploying stations that you have those payment methods available that simplify it for the drivers. Additionally, something that I see is very valuable when you're deploying stations. Depending on what type of business you're working with and who the end driver is going going to end up being, you may be able to configure just a one simple payment method, such as fleet locations, they just want an RFID card that they bring with the keys to the fleet vehicle, tap it to start the session and move on, or a simple plug and charge in different locations. So one, making it simple and giving options, but then also two, customizing it based on the different scenarios that you run into and understanding who the end driver is. From the mobile app perspective, the EV Connect app and a lot of our partner apps have been downloading, downloaded more than 100,000 times. They have really high ratings from drivers and users because it gives them the ability to quickly tap their phone or scan QR codes to start a charging session. And also for any drivers that want the additional convenience, they can order the RFID cards from there or get support when needed, which it goes back to that simple process for customers. And lastly, with EV connect, for our customers and partners handling the payments, it makes it safe and easy for those drivers and for our partners.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Thanks, Paco, for sharing that. I know that that payment aspect is really important for drivers, but for a network, they want to try and get as many people at those charging stations as possible. So tell me a little bit about the concept of roaming and some of the best practices, how you've seen that implemented effectively and what are some of the benefits of roaming?
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Visibility and roaming are going to help drivers find your stations, and it also keeps it easy for customers because you're not tying them to a single app, you're letting them use what they're familiar with. Good example, my family, we recently expanded to now have two EV's, and my wife is getting familiar with charging and been to the different places and she's been asking me, which app do I use here? So when we find those stations that have roaming enabled and we can use one app to start it with our watch or our phone, then it's a happy experience because it keeps it simple. So we do see, in average, our partners achieve a 10% increase in traffic, and it varies depending on location. We've seen locations in big cities where 20 30% of the traffic is coming from roaming transactions because of how heavy EV is, their traffic is there. So I think it's very, very valuable for any company thinking about EV charging and deploying stations, thinking about driver experience, give them that visibility and the option to use what they're familiar with.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: That's great, Paco, and congrats on going all electric for both of your vehicles in your home. That's incredible. Thanks for sharing.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: I'd like to direct our next question to Sarah. Sarah, you probably get a lot of questions from networks that you're onboarding of how they can attract drivers. We talked a little bit about roaming. Tell me a little bit more of other ways that we can increase utilization at new stations. What are some of the tips that you give other networks?
[00:11:37] Speaker C: That's a great question. Definitely utilize EV V vouchers and you can use it two ways. So an EV voucher can be at a location and station. It can be readily available on your phone, and there's actually search options within the app that can tell you which station has a discount on it. That's one way. And then the other way is like if you're like a gas station, right? You can have the e voucher at your convenience store. So that drives more of your drivers to go into the convenience store. Usually when I go, I grab a Coke or I grab a bag of chips or something. Plus I get the e voucher. So that's two ways you can attract new drivers. One is having just an e voucher on new locations altogether. Or if you want to drive traffic, you can just direct it for someone to hand it in if you want them to go to like a convenience store. The good thing also about evoucher is that you can limit it to a specific time, or you can do it by percentage discount, or you can do it by like a value like $2, $5, things like that. So it's really great, very easy to implement.
Great feature. I recommend it very much to every part of the network that I have.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: It makes a lot of sense. Everybody wants a discount. I'm in marketing. I love a good discount on going to those charging stations. So thank you for sharing that. Great pro tip. I'd love to kind of talk a little bit more about the driver support aspect. It's one thing at the charging station, but just want to wrap us up to talk about driver support and then we'll go to the manage really quickly. So Sarah, tell me a little bit about driver support and the importance of that.
[00:13:15] Speaker C: That is your number key for driver satisfaction. To be honest, you need support 24/7 because drivers charge the car any time of day. Usually some do it even after hours or they do it in like stores are closed. So if they're stuck or if there's any issues, they need that help right away. So you need to actually have processes in place also to be able to support that charging. So if your station doesn't work, you need to have a process in place to be able to guide them to another charger. And that's great. Customer service will give you a lot of customer satisfaction. The other thing is also important for your support is to have escalation process. So what if they want a refund? Who's going to do that? Or what if there is? Now you need to go back to that station that was malfunctioning and you need fix it, right? So that escalation process within your team, within your company needs to be also like smoothly or like it, like it flows. Someone needs to know about it. How do you escalate it? How do you take care of it and how do you reach out to the manufacturer if you need. So that type of support is also recommended because that keeps, that makes you proactive, not reactive, which is also very important. It keeps your network up, stations going, drivers, you know, can charge.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: It makes a ton of sense. Thank you for sharing that. I know for myself, I've gotten to a charging station, I drive a Tesla, tried to charge it into a non Tesla charging station, had my adapter ANd guess what? It just didn't work. I couldn't make it work. And having real phone support is critical. I'm in the industry, I've charged my car many times. I'm getting so many more ev drivers. It's really critical to get ThAt driver support right. So let's move on. Let's go to the next slide, please, and let's talk a little bit from the charging experience and move on to how we manage that experience. So this is managing the charger and managing the revenue. And another way to think about manage is managing that back end of the network. So, Nick, I'd like to jump to you and the backend. Technology and reporting capabilities are really crucial. Can you discuss how a network platform leverages OcPDenhe and data reporting to help networks in managing their operations more efficiently?
[00:15:32] Speaker D: Yeah, definitely. I think it's a really important topic because data ultimately is the lifeblood of growing a successful network. I break it down into two categories. There's dashboards and simple snapshots that give you a sense instantaneously of current activity, of health, of the network, of various aspects of just keeping that network running and checking in on how it's going. And then the second piece is really the business intelligence layer. So the much deeper analysis to gain insights that help you understand how are you going to build? How are you going to grow? Where should you be targeting all of that good stuff? So from my perspective, I think the questions were seeing customers really try to answer and the data that we ourselves are collecting and helping provide. Obviously revenue and revenue growth is very important for certain customers, especially where part of that revenue, maybe theres a revenue share business model or the entirety of the charging revenue is earned by the network owner. Very important to track how that revenue growth is happening. Utilization. In a lot of cases, even where maybe your own networks revenue is decoupled from revenue, you still care about how actively the stations are being used because thats important for maybe driving success at particular businesses where those charges are located and things like that. Then there's more advanced stuff tracking utility costs. What's it costing me to run my chargers on a regular basis? For us, we built a number of different tools and dashboards and data reports that prepackage this stuff make it easy to learn about these insights. But we've also taken an approach to enable you to integrate and pull data into your systems because we're aware that a lot of companies already have existing business intelligence tooling. Creating access to that data really helps feed that knowledge that will help you grow. I think the final thing I would just mention on this topic is that ownership of data is critical. And so establishing when you're in that agreement phase, who actually owns the data and how is it going to be used, because that can really be differentiating for your business to make sure that you have access to it and also that you own that data. So something to keep in mind as you think about getting started is making sure that you retain ownership of the data, that it's going to be collected on your network.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing, Nick. Paco, you know, I want to hear from your perspective, let's break it down a little bit further from the customers that you work with, what are the key data points and reports that network operators should be focusing on to ensure that they're managing their networks effectively?
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I want to say financially comes down to cost per port, and there are a lot of components that go into that based on how you are structuring your network. So figuring out how to calculate that cost per port for your network is very important because financially will ensure your success and growth. And then from a report standpoint, the station health and keeping track on how your stations are performing.
Looking at actionable tickets per port, which plays into cost. If you're looking at am I having too many tickets on this station or this port? If the answer is yes, then we need to figure out how to resolve that in the long term. The driver uptime is very important because then if drivers are having issues with the stations, even though the station may seem it's okay, driver uptime is the other indicator that may tell us that there's a problem that needs to be resolved so that drivers keep showing up and utilizing the stations. And then I think at the end of day, it ties into your utilization reports and seeing what percent of time your stations are being utilized. I get so excited to hear from, from customers when they say, hey, I've reached 30% utilization and now I have opportunity to grow more because it's getting closer and to return of investment.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Or.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: When they open new locations and they end up performing better than anything else they've had before. So looking at that utilization is essential.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense and very critical data aspects to ensure that they're managing those networks effectively. So thank you for sharing that. I'd like to think about how networks have different business models. And Sarah, how are you working with some of these networks? That thinking about functions that they take in house and those that they outsource. What are some of the common functions you recommend? Networks consider outsource.
[00:20:21] Speaker C: Definitely support that call center support for 24 hours, seven days a week. Definitely that you can also outsource your installation. We have a partner, Qmerit, that would be like a recommendation that we work with. You can also outsource. That would take a lot of, they have a huge team work every, in every country. So that helps your network grow because they can install anywhere. So definitely the call center, the support and your installation needs.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: And one more piece of advice. If you were to offer it to networks once they're up and running, what are some of the best practices for ongoing management that you would recommend for continued success and reliability?
[00:21:04] Speaker C: That's a very good question. You need someone to manage your network, that network admin that looks at the errors, the fault, the sessions. Like I said, you need to be proactive, not reactive. You see an issue, you see something might be not going right, look at it. That helps with your network, with your uptime and things like that. The other thing I would definitely recommend is your customer success team, your own customer success team, reaching out to that client once a month, seeing like how they're doing, how is the chargers doing, how their business is doing, how you can help them, how you can help them grow. That builds a relationship, that builds your business and it also builds theirs. So if you have your own customer success, it just checks in. That's also great with the clients.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Great. Thank you. Now, we talked about manage. Let's move on to maintain and talk about that step. So again, maintains all about good operations and maintenance to keep those stations up and running. So, Paco, let's talk maintenance. What are some of the best practices you've observed in the O and M space, and how do our clients effectively manage their own personnel and tooling?
[00:22:14] Speaker B: So best practice is when customers come to us and look at our help for acquiring the stations, because then we're able to offer Evconnect Shield and we really just manage everything for our partners, and that's best practice. But I've also seen a lot of success from partners that work very closely with the oems, that they're selecting the manufacturers of the stations they're deciding to deploy.
And that is just essential from planning, getting their technicians of anybody that is building the network certified from the station manufacturers. A lot of them offer very comprehensive training that can help reduce the cost, because then you're not depending on anybody else. So working closely with the station manufacturers is important. And I would say as part of the partnership that you have with those oems, look at having inventory and parts storage review sessions every so often so that you are prepared to tackle station issues as they come. They come up.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Those are some great best practices. Thanks, Paco. Sarah, how do you support networks in setting up their operations and maintenance teams, and what are some of the tools that you provide to help them stay ahead of any potential issues that they may see?
[00:23:39] Speaker C: I'm actually very happy to say that we help from a to z. We help with your onboarding, give you timelines and scope of the project. We keep a very tight timeline for go live. We also help you with the little things like we can support with QR codes, we can support with SIM cards, we can support you with the RFIDs, designing or purchasing them. We also offer, like the one like the customer success that I suggested. We actually have that internally. So after go live, you get that personal, not personal, but you get that customer success who checks in with you. And then to help you to see how the network is going, where do you want to grow your strategy? And then we work together. So, like I said, we help from Adz. Whatever you guys need help with, we're there for you.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: There's a lot of aspects here to the o and M in particular.
Nick, I want to hear from you. How does our platform support the ongoing maintenance needs of our networks, and what are some of the features that have been developed to facilitate this?
[00:24:42] Speaker D: Yeah, so I think the team's done a really good job of helping explain why operations and maintenance is so important for stations. One thing is who's going to be doing the work as an important identifying characteristic of a network. Do you spin up a team? Do you find you outsource that? But having that plan is really important even for networks that are looking at various site hosts. A lot of site hosts don't understand that there's a responsibility there. So there's usually an opportunity to help them do their own servicing, or do it yourselves and provide that service for them. So we're seeing a lot of, say, lucrative opportunities for networks to take on that role. What we've built is a set of tooling. We call it the CNOC, but ultimately the goal of it is to provide both a comprehensive overview of the health of a station to proactively notify where there's issues with stations. People don't have time to sit there all day behind a screen trying to find these issues, right? So being notified proactively that, hey, we're seeing some potential issues with the stations that are worth digging into, is highly valuable for saving time for your O and M team. And then finally taking OCPP out of what is honestly not a very human readable language and giving you true human readable insights is kind of the final piece. So we have a tool called session visualizer that really unpacks what's going on with the station moment to moment. So once you've identified there's potentially an issue, you can get to root cause and then fix very, very quickly. So those are the types of tools that really help you running an O and M team to really understand, like how are we going to like, economically keep our stations healthy and provide good services to our customers.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Great, thanks so much, Nick. So we talked a lot about maintain, and now we're reaching kind of that final milestone that we talked about in our five part path, and that's grow. And to be really frank, if networks don't grow, they die. And so growing is all about adding more stations, new business models, thinking about different partnerships. So that's like third party financing, supporting new use cases like fleet or energy management. It's also about API integrations. And so, Nick, let's start with you on this one. As networks are looking to grow, these integrations and APIs are really critical. Can you discuss the role of APIs and how they help networks integrate with other systems and scale more effectively?
[00:27:09] Speaker D: Yeah, so I want to unpack API a little bit because I think it's a bit of a technical term and I want to make sure it's relatable for everyone. So one way to think about this is today our platform, as an example, has an API integration with Google Maps, which just means that automatically, as stations are created, as the status of those stations changes, Google Maps is automatically receiving that information from us and updating that in real time on the Google Maps app. This is an example of how APIs enable automated backend data sharing or use cases behind the scenes that you don't necessarily need to know are even happening that provide value for customers. In that sense, Google Maps is maybe a basic example, but you can envision all kinds of different use cases that APIs can enable. Things like integrating ticketing systems, things like augmenting station health. Maybe you're managing other assets and you have an operations and maintenance tool that you're using for that, and you'd like to bring the charging operations and maintenance into that flow. In a lot of cases, there are automated data sharing that enable easy compliance with either regulatory reporting or incentive earning opportunities. There's all kinds of things that APIs enable, flexibility to set up and do and perform. And so we've built five different API modules that enable a lot of different use cases. We're continuing to add to that over time because we really feel like our value add to our customers is the ability to enable those flexible use cases and allow you to grow your business your way. So APIs are key to unlocking a lot of these more advanced use cases that you will discover as your network picks up steam and as you start to expand across multiple geographies.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Those are great. I feel like the integrations are endless. So, Sarah, I want to hear from you. When a network's looking to expand or convert existing stations within another network, what are some of the key considerations they need to keep in mind, and how do you help them navigate that process?
[00:29:12] Speaker C: So I'm just happy to say that we have done that multiple times. The last conversion that we did, we moved over 500 connectors. So to understand, first of all, your station has to communicate with the backend, right? So that needs to be certified on your network. The second thing is the easy one. QR codes have to be changed because now you have a, you have a new network, you have a new app, so all the QR codes have to be changed. Credit card readers, who owns the credit card readers? Who pays out? So let's say if it's a paid or Niacs, right, they don't pay out the whole site, they pay out the network. So now you need to create that account with a paid or NIAC, you, you pay out your host site. The other thing, it's the 1800 number because you're going to be in a transition. Station migration or network migration doesn't happen overnight. It can take months, depending on how big the network is. We do have services to offer that we can do network migrations for you, but that 100 number is critical. And the understanding that is there is going to be a, a transition where you're going to have two apps, right? And also who owns the Apple and Google stores and things like that, because in a store you can have two apps deployed. So that's also very important. That's something that we help work with you. Like I said, the 800 number, know that your call center, when they call, they're going to call and they're not going to find a station on one network, but it's on the other and things like that. And so communication with your host site, that's also very important. And like I said, we walk you step by step. We do it in phases. What's most important to you, what's least utilized, and we help you all the way from beginning to end.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Thanks, Sarah. It sounds like it can be complicated, but it's very, very doable. And so, Paco, please help us wrap up in terms of the growth path that you're seeing for networks. What's that typical growth path look like and what do you advise them to do to grow?
[00:31:09] Speaker B: So it really depends on the business model that they select and what I see a lot with, with our partner networks, they start out with one vertical and mostly level two stations. They focus on that vertical and they grow. And after they complete their internal milestones, then they start expanding into other verticals and exploring level three charging or DC fast charging. Other partners right off the back, start solely focused on level three stations. And it really is about finding the right locations that are going to help maximize that utilization.
There are many, many areas across the country that have some empty spots for DC fast charging. And we see our partners approaching this in many ways, whether it's revenue share or leasing. I think it's a really good strategy that if you define early on and you're thinking about DC fasten right now, it's really going to be about pick the right location so that you can get the fastest return on investment.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Great. Thank you so much, Paco.
And that brings us to the end of this episode of the Charging Conversations podcast. Thank you to Paco, Sarah and Nick for today's insightful conversation and to our audience for tuning in. I'd also like to thank our podcast platform, castos, for hosting and editing this episode. If you like what you heard and want to support us, please remember to, like, subscribe and share this podcast with your network. And don't miss out on our next episode. Subscribe now and stay charged. If you have any feedback or requests for future episodes, please let us
[email protected]. until we meet again, keep charging for forward.
