Delivering a better charging experience

James Gale, global operations lead at Konect, explains why inter-industry collaboration is vital if charging networks are to offer an excellent customer experience.

Providing an easy and reliable public charging experience is a critical element of the electric vehicle transition, and there’s no time to waste.

There are more than a million battery-electric cars and vans on UK roads, and that fleet is growing quickly as manufacturers push to meet the Government’s mandatory zero-emission vehicle sales targets and 2035 phase-out date for new combustion engine vehicles.

Electrification is the biggest change in the history of road transport and charging point operators (CPOs) are under unprecedented pressure to deliver high customer service in a challenging market. Maximising uptime relies on an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders, many of whom are new to the transport sector, and network roll-out targets are ambitious. The Government has forecast a need for 300,000 public EV chargers by 2030 to meet demand – that’s five times more than today, according to the latest Zap-Map figures, and that process doesn’t include replacing legacy hardware.

Quantity is only part of the challenge. From November 2024, the Public Charge Point Regulations will require contactless payments for most new units and all rapid chargers, with 24/7 customer support and 99% network-wide uptime reported using the Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI) standard. Networks that miss those targets face financial penalties between £10,000 and £250,000.

Of course, CPOs recognise the importance of uptime for both profitability and reputation-building. Recent surveys by Auto Express and Zap-Map show reliability and usability are already important differentiators, and the new cohort of drivers will rightly expect charging to be at least as convenient as filling with fuel. Especially – and this will become more common as the market expands – if they can’t plug in at home.

Achieving 99% uptime isn’t easy. CPOs are usually first in the firing line if there is a fault, but drivers often aren’t aware of the fragmented network of stakeholders – including utilities, equipment manufacturers and payment system suppliers – that might be called upon to fix those issues. Regulatory compliance could also prove challenging, as OCPI doesn’t specify how faults are reported or differentiate if they are out of the CPOs’ control, such as incidents of vandalism or accidental damage.

However, I believe the e-mobility sector has an important opportunity to do things differently. My background is in traditional fuel retail solutions, where we would be diagnosing problems over the phone to help customers to fix them quickly. The key difference with EV charging is connectivity, which means we can constantly monitor equipment more deeply than was possible with fuel pumps.

For example, Konect, our turnkey charging ecosystem for fleets and fuel retailers, enables 80% of faults to be detected and rectified in software – often before the customer even realises there’s a problem. Our network operations centre can also diagnose issues remotely, before dispatching field engineers with the right parts in hand to get chargers back online within the strictest service level agreements (SLAs).

Providing all of this from a single supplier gives our call centre operators the tools to fix problems within hours, instead of passing issues around between myriad stakeholders and having chargers out of action for days, weeks or even months.

It’s important that CPOs work closely with stakeholders, including energy companies, equipment manufacturers and even cellular networks, and widespread data sharing is critical too. This can help identify and address issues early, and also provide more transparency for end-users. Ensuring drivers arrive at a charger knowing – not hoping – that it’s both available and operational is an important element to help give confidence to switch.

Fuel retail has managed to build an experience that people are used to and accept, and we’re extending that professionalism to the e-mobility space. Ultimately, I think charging should be just as invisible as filling with fuel, where you don’t have to think or worry about reliability. The true barometer is my parents – the day they don’t have anxiety about charging is the day the industry has won. We’re already moving in the right direction.