EV Chargers Soon To Be Rated Like Restaurants: What This Means For CPOs – EQ Mag
We have learned to look for ratings to help drive our purchases as the internet has become a central part of our lives. For example, there is Amazon for product reviews and ratings, TripAdvisor for hotels, Yelp for restaurants and Uber for their drivers and passengers.
It is commonplace for people to leave their opinions of a business and include a rating. Reviews are also bleeding over to social networking sites such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. These social media reviews come with more than words and often include multimedia such as videos and pictures. The internet has become a place to share our customer experience with millions of other consumers. However, these reviews are only sometimes reliable. According to Forbes, for example, TripAdvisor doesn’t require a verified booking at the hotel being reviewed and rated.
What does all of this mean for the future of electric vehicle charger reviews and ratings? As was recently reported, one woman was so disturbed about her EV charging experience that she did something about it. Kate Tyrrell and her boyfriend, James Coyle, founded a company in the U.K. called ChargeSafe, which now has a 60-point inspection that provides up to a five-star rating for an EV charging station.
Their concern was initially around safety issues, such as proper lighting for charging at night and accessibility for disabled drivers. For example, is the point-of-sale (POS) system at a height where a person could use it in a wheelchair? Is the landscaping overgrowing the EV charging station? Is the EV charging station working?
One charge point operator (CPO) told me that they were proactively planning an internal EV charger station inspection to get ahead of the curve on future public ratings. This CPO also believed the EV charger delivering the best consumer experience would be competitively ahead of the curve.
The California Department of General Services has updated the California Building Code Chapter 11B on accessibility requirements for EV charging stations. This includes van and ambulatory access requirements for mobility-impaired drivers. The British Standards Institution is pushing forward with the Publicly Available Specification 1899 regulation for accessible EV charging.
According to a 2020 research report from Ricardo Energy & Environment, “Looking forward to 2035, up to 50% (1.35 million) of all drivers or passengers with a disability (estimated at 2.7 million) are expected to be partially or wholly reliant on public charging infrastructure. Of that 1.35 million, 0.93 million of the total number of disabled drivers are unlikely to be able to charge their vehicle at home, with 0.54 million within that being dependent on on-street parking to park and charge, and the remaining 0.39 million unlikely to have adequate on-street charging either.”
It is crucial that public charging infrastructure be made accessible so that persons with disabilities, as well as senior citizens who are still able to drive, may charge their vehicles comfortably and safely.
Today, many CPOs provide e-mobility applications to help consumers find the nearest EV charging station. However, EV drivers are reporting that they need multiple e-mobility apps to get a good representation of all available chargers near them. They also note that the e-mobility apps need to properly show EV chargers that are down and not functioning correctly. To further promote positive changes in the industry, J.D. Power will begin presenting awards annually to public EV charging providers with the highest levels of customer satisfaction.
Of all the concerns of current and future EV drivers, “range anxiety” is taking precedence. For example, the Pew Research Center reported that nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans surveyed “back federal spending to build a network of electric vehicle charging stations across the country.” However, according to the World Economic Forum, “Range anxiety—worries about the distance an EV can travel on a single charge—is another main barrier to electric vehicle adoption.”
As we discovered in the history of fuel retail, it comes down to the “customer experience” of EV charging. It is well known in retail that a poor customer experience drives consumers to your competitors. With EV chargers, retailers with an EV charging station on-site now deal with monetizing the dwell time of people charging their EVs. Some reported trends in the EV Consumer Behavior report were from Kohls, which stated that shoppers spend about $1 per minute within an hour window while charging their EV.
The days will come when reviews and ratings will drive us to the EV charging stations with five stars. Consumers demand a clean, safe and efficient place to charge their EVs. Plus, since it is no longer plug-and-go like the fuel days, dwell time becomes a more critical factor. Many CPOs focus on the EV charger itself and installing as many as they can as quickly as they can. Government funding demands high uptimes for EV sites funded by their grants. In the end, the consumers of EV charging will require an excellent charging experience, or they will go elsewhere. Those CPOs that pay attention to the maintenance and upkeep of their EV charging sites will ultimately be the market winners.
Source: forbes
