Customized interaction platform for digital vehicle extras

The project at a glance

• Multi-channel: Customers receive timed notifications by email, SMS, push notifications in their app or head unit, preferably at suitable times of day.
• Value-added services: Customers receive customized recommendations and notifications that specifically address their personal needs and preferences.
• Multi-Market: The solution supports markets worldwide, taking into account their respective legal, technical and cultural requirements.
• Evolutionary Architecture: A software architecture approach that is specifically designed for continuous customization and improvement. It allows the system to evolve flexibly by making and adapting technical decisions incrementally in response to changing business requirements and technologies.
• Orchestration: Providing intelligent, prioritized orchestration of the user lifecycle communication journey enables the right communication at the right time.
• BusDevOps Approach: The approach combines business, development and operations to develop the system efficiently and in a customer-centered way.
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Initial situation

A leading car manufacturer offers its customers an extensive digital ecosystem for vehicles with various value-added services. These license-bound digital services mean that the company is obliged to inform customers when the license for a purchased service expires.

In addition to this legal requirement, it is important to the company to embed its customers in the digital ecosystem in the best possible way. Both end customers (B2C) and business customers (B2B) should be taken into account. The key to this is customer communication. The challenge here is the complexity created by

• diverse channels (e.g. vehicle, email, SMS, app, etc.),
• country-specific requirements (e.g. time zones, communication channels) and
• situational requirements for time-critical situations, for example (e.g. real-time updates directly to the vehicle)

results.

Another important factor is to enable the sale of digital value-added services by communicating in a targeted manner depending on the customer situation and thus generating license sales.

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Solution

The project covers a wide range of use cases for the car manufacturer's customers that have been developed and deployed over the last few years.

A customized software solution was designed and developed, which is based on a flexible microservice architecture in order to map use cases in a modular way. Customer communication in the context of marketing campaigns requires good scalability. In addition, the evolutionary architecture allows for good expandability in order to map further use cases.

The solution integrates data from more than 28 of the car manufacturer's internal systems in order to provide personalized content via various communication channels such as the app, email and vehicle head unit.
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Team and collaboration
pentacor provides an independent DevOps team and architecture skills for the implementation. Together with the car manufacturer, we conceptualized and developed the recommendation engine from a simple reminder product to a comprehensive recommendation engine.
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Technology and architecture
The technical basis consists of Java Spring Boot, DocumentDB, ActiveMQ, Pub/Sub connections, and Angular for a configuration user interface. Following the BusDevOps approach, the solution is continuously integrated and deployed (CI/CD), enabling efficient and rapid development. For maximum scalability and portability, the solution is hosted in the automotive manufacturer's cloud environment on AWS, utilizing EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). Thanks to event-based integration patterns for connecting external backend systems, the architecture is highly scalable and expandable, allowing for quick adaptation to new requirements.

Quality and Security

A strong commitment to quality is reflected in extensive automated testing and excellent security test results. This ensures a stable and secure solution that is continuously developed to support new use cases and functionalities.

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Result

The project offers tangible added value for the car manufacturer and its customers. They benefit from personalized recommendations, time-sensitive notifications and reminders about services, functions and license processes. Free services are activated automatically, while targeted notifications make it easier to use and connect to the vehicle. In addition, over-the-air updates provide information about relevant system improvements.

One example is the personalized usage recommendation for purchased services, based on the analysis of user behavior (with the customer's consent). Similarly, buyers of an electric vehicle receive specific onboarding messages directly in the vehicle that support them in using the vehicle and its services in the electromobility environment.

For the car manufacturer, the success is reflected in measurable results: the sale of digital value-added services has significantly increased sales, making the solution a central tool for direct customer communication.

Additional intelligent and personalized use cases are planned for the future, geared towards both real-time situations and targeted customer information campaigns.