At the beginning, connectivity in cars was limited to safety related services such as e-call (automatic emergency call), b-call (roadside assistance) and stolen vehicle tracking. Now car manufacturers want to address infotainment needs. Connectivity offers a seamless access to services and contents.
Car manufacturers may be afraid of driver infotainment data consumption volume and may not want to pay for related charges. A solution consists to split the service charging between the car manufacturer and the driver (who becomes a third-party payer).
In this situation, the car manufacturer remains the owner of the ecall SIM card and the infotainment SIM card (note that depending on models, both services can be supported by a unique SIM card). The car manufacturer only pays for charges for the ecall service data consumption and declares the driver as a third-party payer for the charges of the infotainment data consumption. The driver may already be a CSP (Communication Service Provider) customer or not. The car manufacturer, being the SIM card(s) owner, remains the only liable party in case of default.
The car manufacturer either handles the third party payer themselves or gives a mandate to CSP to perform this management. In the latter case, the driver will use a CSP portal to update his information such as bank account information, billing address…
The car manufacturer can outsource connected car customer support to a call center which:
- takes calls from drivers when a problem occurs,
- analyses them,
- distributes them to car manufacturer or CSP according to their nature,
- Provides an answer to customer when problem is solved.
The call center fee depends on the number of handled trouble tickets and several processing quality indicators of these tickets. In addition, the car manufacturer may invoice CSP depending on number of trouble tickets related to connectivity issues
The call center can also monitor / audit SLA and handle SLA violation by notifying SLA violation events to the car manufacturer and the CSP.
Car manufacturer can also partner with infotainment service provider (or aggregator) and CSP to create new infotainment converged offer. These offers are managed in a central catalog accessible by partner and can be ordered through different distribution channels (car manufacturer, CSP or infotainment content provider).