The Experiences Per Mile Advisory Council, a collaborative effort from companies including Harman, Amazon, Spotify, Ford and others within the technology and automotive spheres, has revealed details of its mission to create an ‘Experiences Per Mile’ metric for the automotive industry, which it has set out in a new report.
The council notes that a rapid shift is underway in the way consumers think about their automotive and mobility experiences – from evaluating functional product attributes to consumer-centric mobility experiences. It describes this as a shift from RPM (revolutions per minute) to EPM (experiences per mile). It feels that current research methodologies fall short of measuring the holistic mobility experience and is calling for industry collaboration to formalize a new metric that will work for all: OEMs, suppliers, technology partners and consumers, alike.
It states that a new form of measurement will enable better decision making for end customers, while proving actionable insights and feedback for OEMs and mobility providers. The experience-led metric will also need to measure journey-based satisfaction as well as the overall ownership or service experience, aligning it with expectations set by smartphones and software that experience gets better over time, and will make consumers’ lives more seamless.
Published with insight from 34 different stakeholders across 23 global automotive and technology companies, the report outlines what constitutes a good measurement, the ways a metric could be developed, and the qualities needed to meet the needs of the discerning consumer and the industry at large.
The council outlines that the characteristics or drivers of a successful industry metric will be:
- Simplicity – Must be understood by all including consumers (users) and executives/engineers (providers).
- Intelligent – Ideally, over time the metric will have the ability to learn about how the experience “taught” and informed future customer experiences.
- Transparent – Unlike a dating site or music app driven by a proprietary algorithm, the EPM metric must show its calculation method to all.
- Holistic – Measurement must capture the beginning, middle and end of a journey, and all significant points in between.
- Contextual – Every journey is made up of a series of moments often driven by the context surrounding the driver or a consumer’s state of being. Outside influences such as traffic, weather conditions, time of day, uncertain areas and more all impact the context to which the mobility experience can be evaluated.
- Scalable – Must scale to cover experiences from all auto makers and eventually various modes of transportation.
- Flexible – Any metric must be flexible enough to accommodate the high degree of change that will take place in the coming years due to the advancement of features and technology.
- Actionable – Before developing an experience “cure”, “diagnosing” the root cause of a failed or inferior journey is necessary.
- Credible – Must further become the “gold standard” that consumers and providers can fully trust and rely on to help them make immediate or long-term decisions on vehicle purchases, leases and more.
- Established – A successful metric will receive recognition as the go-to source and achieve broad distribution of its ratings and data.
The EPM Advisory Council says it is prioritizing collaboration and invites input, ideation and participants for the development of the proof of concept and investigation into how to scale the metric across the broader industry.
For more information the full report can be downloaded here.
