Episode 122: Liz Allan and Kate Tyrrell - “Plugging into the Future” Improving the EV Charging Experience

Episode 122: Liz Allan and Kate Tyrrell -“Plugging into the Future” Improving the EV Charging Experience.

In this special episode of the Electric Evolution Podcast, Liz Allan flips the script as she becomes the interviewee. Joining her is Kate Tyrrell from ChargeSafe, who leads the discussion on Full Circle CI’s white paper, “Plugging Into the Future”, and the insights it provides for Charge Point Operators (CPOs) in improving the EV driver experience. Together, they discuss practical steps to improve EV charging infrastructure, from enhancing accessibility and user experience to building trust through education and seamless customer support.

Quote of the episode:
“Simplifying the charging experience isn’t just about convenience, it’s about building trust and increasing utilisation by delivering a seamless service for drivers.” – Liz Allan

Liz Allan Bio:
Liz Allan is the Managing Director of Full Circle CI, specialising in continuous improvement for the EV charging sector. With a focus on enhancing customer journeys and operational efficiency, Liz combines her expertise and personal EV experience to help businesses create seamless and inclusive charging solutions.

Liz Allan Links:
Full Circle CI Diagnostic: “Charge Up Your Success” Charge Point Operator Diagnostic
https://fullcircleci.scoreapp.com
“Plugging into the Future” White Paper:
https://fullcircleci.co.uk/plugging-into-the-future-whitepaper

Kate Tyrrell
Kate Tyrrell is the founder and CEO of ChargeSafe, the UK’s first EV charging site accreditation body. Passionate about safety and accessibility, Kate works with Charge Point Operators to ensure infrastructure is inclusive, user-friendly, and meets the needs of all EV drivers.

Kate Tyrrell Links:
Website: https://www.chargesafe.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-tyrrell

Transcript

Liz Allan [00:00:02]:
Ok. So we're having a bit of a different episode today. I have got Kate Tyrrell with me from Charge Safe. Kate, you've been on here before. Thank you very much for joining me, and I will explain what we're gonna do in a second, but just say hi.

Kate Tyrrell [00:00:18]:
Hi. You look so nervous.

Liz Allan [00:00:20]:
I am.

Kate Tyrrell [00:00:21]:
Deep breaths. We are flipping the script. I am going to be interviewing Liz for a change. Liz, how do you feel about that?

Liz Allan [00:00:31]:
I am really nervous. I'm not used to it being the other way around. We decided a few weeks ago that it would be a good idea to discuss the white paper that my Business Full Circle CI has released because not everybody has read it. And, Kate, you can explain. You've not read it, have you?

Kate Tyrrell [00:01:00]:
I've not read it. Yeah. So I approached Liz on this a little while back and said, look. I've got to admit I have not read through your beautiful white paper. And whilst I am incredibly proud of you, Liz, for creating this document, which I don't think I could ever in a million years, I find it difficult to access that information because for me, mostly, I'll be listening to podcasts when I'm driving up and down the country doing inspections or going to deliver an accreditation. So that's my way of receiving information, which is through audio. Mhmm. I want to sit down and take that time to read through this beautifully put-together document. I have to say, it's just not for me. And I thought, hey, if I'm thinking like this, maybe there's some other neurospicy people out there who, you know, I need to hear it from someone, dumbed down a little bit because there's a lot of jargon in there.

Kate Tyrrell [00:01:57]:
There are some really very professional terms. And if we want to get this information out to the masses, we just need to make it a little bit more accessible. So you very kindly agreed to let me interview you on this and ask all the questions. 

Kate Tyrrell [00:02:14]:
I'm hoping that others might have on their mind about it too if they've not read it, but they they still wanna engage with that information. So thank you so much for agreeing to this.

Liz Allan [00:02:24]:
I said this on the podcast I recorded with Jess Shanahan. I'm also neurospicy. So so actually writing something like that and I suppose thinking about the neurospicy community. And when I say neurospicy, I mean the spectrum of autism. So, actually, there are quite a lot of us out there. You will not realise how many people I have spoken to in the last 18 months since I had my diagnosis.

Kate Tyrrell [00:03:11]:
So some people don't even realise themselves yet, do they, Liz? They could be on the spectrum, but they might find that they're actually struggling with staying on task and focused on one particular thing. So I know that, similarly to me, you easily get distracted by a new shiny thing. You could be sideswiped onto a different project. So to focus on producing a white paper is an incredible feat. So, you know, congratulations.

Kate Tyrrell [00:03:41]:
It has to be said. It's such a big task. And then and then it's reading it, which for me is a big task. So I know.

Liz Allan [00:03:49]:
I know. And it's 35 pages long, and it could have been longer. It was one of those things that I'd never done before. I've seen white papers in this sector, and they're a lot shorter. But my main thought about starting this was I just wanted to understand. So okay. I'm gonna explain. It's called Plugging into the Future.

Liz Allan [00:04:19]:
The white paper came from starting my own journey with driving an EV last last year, and my background is in continuous improvement as well. And we've I've always

Kate Tyrrell [00:04:35]:
I'm gonna stop you there.

Liz Allan [00:04:36]:
Go go go.

Kate Tyrrell [00:04:37]:
Jump in straight away. When you say continuous improvement, can you tell us tell us all as if nobody knows what continuous improvement means? What is your day-to-day role? What is continuous improvement?

Liz Allan [00:04:51]:
Okay. So, my day-to-day role as Managing Director of Full Circle CI is a business improvement consultant. And that basically means that I look at a business holistically, not just at one part of it. I look at it holistically, and the aim is to identify areas where they're struggling or their processes aren't quite working, or things where the customer experience has an the knock-on effect is with the customer. So the idea is that I identify those areas that need improving, and we work on small changes. So it's called kaizen, which is many people will have heard of probably. However, Kaizen is a Japanese term that means small incremental changes.

Liz Allan [00:05:44]:
So, I don't work with massive, big step changes. Where we've gotta go from there to there, and it's massive and takes years. Because of my, and you have a neurospicy brain as well, and I now realise this. I'm the kind of person that I like to help companies make those small changes that make a difference not just to them, but to their customers. 

Kate Tyrrell [00:06:08]:
So you're internal and external. So you improve the external customer journey by taking a peek behind the curtain and helping them with their internal processes that create a more, yeah, stable journey. So okay. So you get your first EV, you realise that actually there's a lot of shakiness in the industry. Nobody's really working to to the same standard, in terms of what that resulting journey looks like, and you go, right? Okay. Somebody needs my help here. You produce this white paper.

Kate Tyrrell [00:06:42]:
The white paper didn't produce itself, but there's so much more that goes into it. So can you just tell us what is this white paper? What what you want to achieve with it? And then we'll get into a bit more of that detail.

Liz Allan [00:06:55]:
Okay. I'll I think I probably better tell you where it started. So I put a number of questions together for EV drivers to be able to understand whether they were experiencing the same things as me when I was actually going to charge our EV because we've only got a small battery, and I was driving quite a lot. So, various things were happening. And I'd heard various people talking about all these different things, but I wanted to get something credible. I wanted to get something in place. So I wrote a survey, on using Microsoft. I put it on, the Women Drive Electric Facebook group because and I'll explain this.

Liz Allan [00:07:39]:
I actually was so unsure of what I was putting out there to start off with. I wanted it I wanted to feel safe. And I knew that if I put it straight on LinkedIn and it was crap, I didn't intend for it to be crap. But I knew that that would be like, oh my god. My neurospicy brain finds rejection quite difficult. So so, you know, so I actually just trialled it there first, and we got about 75 ladies to fill this in.

Kate Tyrrell [00:08:10]:
That's amazing. So, I think the Women Drive Electric on Facebook just reached 4,000 members, which is fantastic. So, getting 75 people engaged in one post is also quite a huge thing, isn't it? Because we're not all on Facebook at the same time. No. These are normal women who've just got on an EV or EV curious, giving you their honest feedback.

Liz Allan [00:08:34]:
Totally. And it was refreshing to see some of the answers to some of the questions. So I was asking them about their different charging experiences. We also gave them free text and this was a really interesting bit. I gave them free text to give me information about their challenges. So, loads came back with all the challenges. Some themes came out of this as well. But I also asked them if there was one thing they could improve in the charging experience, what would that be? And, again, just so much rich data and information.

Liz Allan [00:09:23]:
So I put it into a spreadsheet. My son is is a Google person. I'm an Excel person, but I needed things to change into tables. I am I am a spreadsheet girl, but I'm not, I'm not kind of like I can't create, you know, wonderful graphics and things, you know, and pivot tables and all that kind of stuff. And that was James. So my son, James, who's.

Kate Tyrrell [00:09:48]:
Like Well done.

Liz Allan [00:09:50]:
Yeah. Well done, James. We sat here some nights at my desk going, I'm going, I need you to transfer this into this thing, and I don't know how to do it. So it was one of those. Boys, you're like you're like you're like an old old lady.

Kate Tyrrell [00:10:04]:
I don't know if you can help me.

Liz Allan [00:10:06]:
I feel like an old lady sometimes. But anyway, so it was about translating that data into something tangible, but digging right down into it to find out what the crooks of all these issues were that people were coming back with. And like I say, themes were coming out of it. You'd be really interested because accessibility came up a lot. Yeah. Problems with well, there were some with behaviour at charging points.

Kate Tyrrell [00:10:36]:
Mhmm.

Liz Allan [00:10:37]:
Usually, it is due to either person, let's just say, ICE-ing. So ICE-ing is space, not icing a cake. Basically, we should explain this for other people who might not know what it is. It is where a combustion engine vehicle is sat on a charger. And, actually, I've seen a video on "Dave takes it on" where he literally had that situation. And that's a YouTube channel, by the way, for those of you who don't know. So there were things about that. There were things about behaviour at chargers and from queuing and things and people being plugged in over, you know, when they've gone past you know, they've got to 100% and things like that.

Liz Allan [00:11:19]:
So there were lots and lots of things. Like I said, there were themes coming out that were.

Kate Tyrrell [00:11:24]:
How did you go about segmenting that, Liz? Because everybody wouldn't have used the same terminology. They wouldn't have said I was ICE-d or I had a confrontation or someone stayed past it. So you would have had to read through every single text box where you've allowed this free text, which is a bold move when collecting data anyway. I know. But then you would have created, I'm assuming, subcategories that you could filter those results through and say, you know, we've had 5 aggressive responses or 5 accessible concerns or people who have had issues with icing. So how long did you spend on that? And how did you segment all of these problems and give them titles?

Liz Allan [00:12:11]:
I will tell you now it's taken months to do this, and I have had support from other people. So Jess Shanahan, supported me. And, actually, she highlighted certain things that I'd not even thought of with kind of segregation, identifying these areas, and highlighted the key challenges. So it was it wasn't easy because there were so many different things. It was about pulling those together. So you put them into one theme and then you'd realiss those things were related. So so things that were related like the queuing and behavior and icing and and sometimes even the reliability of charging, You have to be really careful where you put them because they you know, you could kinda categorize them, you know, altogether, but it's just being very careful about pulling it pulling it apart. And it has it's taken oh god. I can't even tell you the number of late nights.

Liz Allan [00:13:17]:
But we had, you know, kind of pulling this or I had pulling this together. And like I say, Jess helped me and my son helped me. But a lot of this, I was writing. So we've got even safety and security. We asked them what amenities they would like. If you've got a charge a good charging hub. In that case, they've started, you know, the operators have started to recognise that having amenities within that charging hub is a good idea because you're going to be sat somewhere waiting for your charging. You know? So I asked them that question and gave them a few options, and then lots of people were kind of saying the usual, which is toilets. They want some shelter because they don't want to be totally soaked in the rain.

Liz Allan [00:14:08]:
They wanted WiFi. Yeah. Because actually, the thing about WiFi is if you haven't got it at a site, then how do you know, if you can only initiate the charge through an app, which I know that the charging regs have made, you know, it's less likely that people will do that. Probably, a lot of them will still.

Kate Tyrrell [00:14:28]:
Not all chargers yet conform with that.

Liz Allan [00:14:30]:
I know. Exactly. So you know, if you need I had this recently with one operator, about kind of 30 miles away from where I am here. I was on my way back from the Cotswolds. Exactly that exactly that happened. The site had an outage. Got there. I couldn't get Wi-Fi.

Liz Allan [00:14:52]:
I couldn't get 5 g on my phone. I ended up ringing my husband. Can you tell me when the nearest charger is, please? Because this was a massive sight. Yeah. And I never expected it to be, you know, an outage. It was just one of those things that hadn't been communicated. It wasn't on Zap Map. That is actually another thing: the instant information going through to Zap Map and Electroverse. Some things came up in the survey.

Liz Allan [00:15:20]:
There were points about inaccurate charging station information. And the day that I had this problem with the outage, the charger that my husband pointed us to wasn't in the place that it said. Oh. Luckily, I thought

Kate Tyrrell [00:15:36]:
Isn't it? There's there's Yeah. It's not a cohesive, very smooth journey that you have experienced yourself there. You're getting all of this feedback coming from all these, different drivers. And then there's there's 2 very important things that would have come out with that data and that is, what is the operator what can the operator influence and control? Mhmm. And what can they not control? You can't control if some prat is going to pull up, at a charge point and go knock on your window. Or, love, when when are you gonna be done? Because that would freak me right out. And I know I've seen that on the Women Drive Electric Facebook group where they've had drivers approach them and say, you know, what are you doing? Can you move on? That is not necessarily within the operator's control. Creating a more safe and secure environment is within their control.

Kate Tyrrell [00:16:29]:
Making sure that their back office systems update the mapping applications that are available to say, you know, this site is down. This is not available right now. Please go somewhere else is within their control. So did you have a process for, like, filtering out, well, they can control and influence this, and this is something that we need to be doing more with the the driver behaviour and learning?

Liz Allan [00:16:51]:
So for for the initial output of the survey and the white paper, I was quite factual about, right, these are the things that people are saying. Yeah. But what I moved on to do was, right, okay. This is what they're saying, but these these are;  I wanted to just not just sound like we were just moaning, putting all the moans out there. To me, it's about actually communicating potential recommendations. So in the recommendation section, for example, people don't people, there was a lot that came back with regards to the price of EV charging. But, actually, there are a number of things that are out of the operator's control there. Yeah.

Liz Allan [00:17:41]:
I don't know how they would or whether they would want to communicate this information. But, actually, in some ways, I personally think there's got to be some level of that to be able to help. I'm not saying it's not gonna make everybody happy, but actually, if you've got that information on the cost and pricing where it comes to, it's the biggest thing to me with, with a lot of this is education. Mhmm. You know, with and I know you're saying about people rocking up to  charger and and having a bit of a go. That's not out of their control. I would say it is within their control in some ways. It's about educating those drivers, and this is what I'm trying I've tried to say in in the white paper as well.

Liz Allan [00:18:27]:
Please educate the drivers about what their cars can take when they're charging because your system should be able to detect it, hopefully, or at least provide some information. Have it on the screen. Have the information, at least, some forms of education, not necessarily around the pricing, but around educating those drivers who think they've got to sit on until they're 100%. Why they shouldn't do it as they maybe know.

Kate Tyrrell [00:18:59]:
Just don't. Just get to 80% and leave.

Liz Allan [00:19:01]:
But they don't know this. Yeah. Drivers don't know this because nobody's told them.

Kate Tyrrell [00:19:06]:
And the thing with something like this is that I did get to speak to Vicky Reid very recently. She is the CEO of Charge UK, a UK body of ChargePoint network operators. They've all clubbed together, and they're working with a united voice to make positive change in the UK. What I've said to her is, could you not just get everybody to put in a little bit of cash to create a streamlined marketing plan to go out to the drivers? So it doesn't matter, you know, if you're a larger charge point network operator or a smaller one. You put in the budget that fits your business size. That's all clubbed together. They go out with a big television, radio, and social media campaign that says, hey. If you are EV curious or you're already driving an EV, this is the correct etiquette when you're travelling and using public charging infrastructure.

Liz Allan [00:20:59]:
So if operators can do that and provide that element of marketing budget that goes with an education campaign. Oh, my God. I think that would make so much difference. And actually, we talked about, you know, obviously, there's a kind of Electric Vehicles UK now that has been launched. I think if we can we can counter that negativity that's out there about charging from from bodies like Charge UK and Electric Vehicles UK Limited, we're changing the narrative behind charging. I know from the white paper that there are still issues. And I want just to go back a second and say what the charge point operators are doing is excellent. It's brilliant.

Liz Allan [00:21:55]:
Honestly, the network is growing massively, and some fantastic organisations are out there. So I wanna say thank you to all of you because, you know, we need this. This is a new infrastructure. It's so important, but I'm very much about getting it right first time if you can. Yeah. Initially, what we had was that you didn't know what you didn't know. We were put, you know, chargers were going in, and you just didn't know because there was no there was no baseline for anything.

Kate Tyrrell [00:22:28]:
No guidance. No standards. It was, you know, if you can acquire the land and you can build on it, get the right permissions. There was no template of what people were trying to deliver. They just wanted to ensure that the charge point went in, that the branding was there, that you could plug in and go, and that was the bare minimum. And now, we're just evolving. And do you know what? What I am going to say is I recently watched Victoria on Netflix, which was hugely educational for me and, not just because, you know, Prince Albert is an absolute hottie but, but what I didn't realise, and I must be so silly for not even knowing this, but the railway happened. So if you think about, like, the industrial revolution and then, you know, the railway systems coming into place in Victorian times, which is, you know, what, 100, 200 years ago, and at that point, where did they know where to put the railway stations? Like, how did they know where to lay the track, which directions people would want to be moving in and travelling in and getting on and off and where those, you know, connections so, you know, to travel across the country, you might have to change once or twice, or you might be able to get a direct train.

Kate Tyrrell [00:23:42]:
It's similar to what we're going through now with EV charging infrastructure is how do you know where to put these things? And you've got some really lucky ducks that have got, you know, the motorway service stations because you know you're gonna get usage there. But when it comes to the A and B roads or rural locations, how can you predict what will need to go where? But also the user experience. So you would have had to pay in coins for your paper ticket, back in the day for your train and hope there was always a member of staff available to support you and help you on and off the train. How did, the train driver, know when to open or shut the doors? I think you remember those clicky doors that you said. I don't even know what happened on Steam trains and stuff, but.

Liz Allan [00:24:29]:
You're not that old, are you, love?

Kate Tyrrell [00:24:31]:
Steam trains. I remember there being a door that you would click, and you could look through the window up and down.

Liz Allan [00:24:36]:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kate Tyrrell [00:24:37]:
It was all, you know, smooth electric doors opening and closing. But at some point, somebody must have said, let's make this a better user experience. And what we've got now are learnings from historical massive infrastructure changes that we can, you know, use to our benefit and get to the best user experience quicker than over 100 years of what the railway was going through to create a not altogether reliable, let's be real. You know? National Rauschord. Yep. But a more optimal user experience. What we're trying to do in our individual businesses and what you've, you know, shining a light on with your white paper is you could do this now and, you know, cut the crap and get to ultimate user experience, bigger profits, you know, get a return on your investment tomorrow. Like, we don't have to learn everything the hard way now.

Liz Allan [00:25:37]:
And, actually, do you know what you've just made me think about? If you so, when I, and my husband used to live in Bourne End near Maidenhead, there are many unused railway lines around there where they pulled it all up. Right.

Kate Tyrrell [00:25:49]:
And if you think about it.  
That's an expensive waste, isn't it?

Liz Allan [00:25:55]:
And also think about the petrol stations now. In Bourne End, there was a little petrol station. It was a little independent one that closed down. So just think about how many lines have been taken up and how many petrol stations have been removed. You know, I know I think initially we had thousands and thousands of petrol stations using that infrastructure. And now we're down to, is it, something like 8000 or 9000 petrol stations throughout the UK? It is about learning from those experiences, but we now have geospatial data and information like that. We've got information on roads, how many, you know, how many vehicles are travelling up and down a road daily. But it's it's about making sure that the infrastructure and I know that the operators know this.

Liz Allan [00:26:45]:
It's gotta be in as many places as we can. If you look at many rural towns, there's not loads of rural, you know, charging in rural places. Michele, who works with me in Full Circle, is up in Amble in Northumberland. And there's not a lot of charging around there. There's a couple, you know. So it's it's that learning curve. But as you said, we have this opportunity to change. I would say it's it's an opportunity to change driver behaviour for a start off Yeah.

Liz Allan [00:27:24]:
Knowing that you don't always have to go to motorway services. We are, currently recording this just before Christmas. It's the week before Christmas. You know what's gonna happen, Kate. Next week, we'll hear something in the news. There'll be some negativity about people queuing at motorway services or something like that. Not petrol stations, at charging hubs, you know, where people are okay. I've come back a bit.

Liz Allan [00:27:50]:
I'm not where people are complaining because they can't get on a charger.

Kate Tyrrell [00:27:55]:
Whereas smart EV drivers will know at least 2 to 3 stations. If that's so for me, I make a regular trip from the Cotswolds down to Chichester, which is where all my family are. I know if I stop at a certain motorway service station around the Oxford area, that has become extremely popular with motorway travellers. However, if queues are backing that one up, I will travel less than 10 miles down the A34 and get to the next one, where they've got 2 separate operators, usually very quiet. I can grab a coffee. I can chill out in my car using a high-powered charger. There are options there. I always like to make sure by the time I've gotten to this specific Oxford motorway service station that I have an extra 10 to 20 miles range just in case I need it, and that's because I've learned the hard way. I don't have time to sit around in a queue, waiting, and I think that happened in October, half term, just a few months ago.

Kate Tyrrell [00:29:02]:
That motorway service area was pumped with EVs waiting to get onto a charger. And I just thought, there's another one down the road. And it's it's having those backups in your in your system or just having that reassurance that, you know, there are several more that are just waiting for customers.

Liz Allan [00:29:21]:
So as part of the white paper, one of the suggestions or the recommendations that I put forward was if we can actually or the operators can put LCD displays or some kind of display that says at peak times, they can use it for advertising during the day or whatever. But at peak times, send people to other chargers. Send them it might sound counterintuitive because I know you wanna increase your utilization. Still, actually, if somebody goes there and there's loads of queues, that's gonna be that's gonna reduce the knock on your reputation. Whereas, if you kinda say next nearest charger so operator half a mile away, x number of charges there at whatever. You know, if you can give them some options to go somewhere else, that'll make such a difference, whereas at the moment, everybody's just doing what they used to do.

Liz Allan [00:30:34]:
Yeah. You know, last year, so Christmas last year, I remember one of the charge point operators put out a Christmas post saying that the 23rd and 27th of December would be the busiest times to travel. So if you don't if you don't need to travel on those days, then please don't. But these are the things that you can do. Of course, what days were we travelling? We were going down to Westwood Ho for Christmas. And we went to, and I'd said and I've talked about this before on the podcast. I'd said to my husband, bless him. I think it's probably a good idea for us not to go to the motorway services because of this.

Liz Allan [00:31:10]:
Oh, no. It will be fine. Be fine. You know? And we got on the charger, and we couldn't get on a rapid or an ultra-rapid. And we had to go on, like, a 22 kilowatt. And it wasn't fully 

Kate Tyrrell [00:31:21]:
Talk about that though, Liz, because did you feel a bit smug?

Kate Tyrrell [00:31:24]:
There is no there is no greater sense of satisfaction that I can extract from my marriage like being right about stuff. If I if I want to admit it, 

Liz Allan [00:31:36]:
Yes. I did feel slightly smug. But what I would have preferred was for us to get there. I mean, literally, we were pulling through it, and it was 22 kilowatts. I think it was a 22-kilowatt AC charger, which I now realize our car will not pull very much on something like that. But it was only pulling 3.5 kilowatts because it was it was rammed. It was totally rammed. And I and I'd literally because it was still quite early days in sort of, like, driving EVs. I had my backup plan on my notes on my iPhone and kind of going, right.

Liz Allan [00:32:12]:
Okay. There's one a mile away from here. Yeah. And we got it, and I said, oh, yeah. Okay. Let's be fair enough. And we went there. There was nobody there.

Liz Allan [00:32:21]:
Nobody. So everybody had all gone to this place. So this is again about education. It's knowledge transfer. Just allowing the drivers in a situation like that to go somewhere else. You don't always need to have that information up there, but in busy times.

Kate Tyrrell [00:32:43]:
Your idea of of pointing to somewhere, and I think what the operators will be cautious of is, well, you know, obviously, they'll have investors and a board that they need to answer to. And why would you send your users to the competition? But it can be as simple as if you think back to the last time you were in London and you look at a map and it says you were here, and you can see where all the underground stations are on the map. Right? It could be something as simple as there is a 75 kilowatt here. There's a 150 here. Yeah. You don't have to name the brand, but at least having that visibility and transparency of, by the way, if we're really busy, which they will know if they're at full capacity because they've constantly got people plugging in and plugging out, they can flash that up on their, LED screen to say, have you considered maybe going to these different locations? This is 1.2 miles away. This is 4.3 miles away. And just putting maybe just, even like a circumference of 10-mile range so that your customers are better informed.

Kate Tyrrell [00:33:45]:
And that will mean they've got a more positive association with your brand. That's what I mean. They will likely try you again fast next time because you're also giving them those alternatives.

Liz Allan [00:33:54]:
Being helpful—yeah, you're helping them. And, like I said earlier, it might sound counterintuitive, but I think people will learn to trust you as a brand more because you're being helpful.

Kate Tyrrell [00:34:09]:
Yeah.

Liz Allan [00:34:10]:
And yet it might, you know if we talk about return on investment and whether you've got drivers coming back to you. Like you say, you're more likely to have that. Maybe at the time, if you're at full capacity, you can't take any more on anyway. So isn't it better for somebody to send them somewhere that's close by rather than having a good old moan about your network? Yeah. And then they'll know to come back to you because they'll go, they're the helpful network.

Kate Tyrrell [00:34:40]:
Exactly. Exactly. So, let's summarise this because we've gone off on a few different tangents. You've done this incredible white paper. You went to Women Drive Electric. You got this really great feedback from a place where you felt safe enough to be a bit vulnerable. Like, oh, I'm trying to get this feedback. How does it look to you? You've gained all of this insight from 75 incredible women.

Kate Tyrrell [00:35:06]:
What did you then put out on LinkedIn, and what was that response like? Did you see a difference between the Women Driver Electric group and the LinkedIn group?

Liz Allan [00:35:14]:
Do you know what? No. Not really. There was an occasional comment that asked what you're doing about this, what you're doing this for kind of thing. Not actually on any of the posts, though, in the comments. Right. But I can count them on one hand.

Kate Tyrrell [00:35:29]:
Trying to answer a survey and Right. 

Liz Allan [00:35:31]:
But I can count them on one hand. I'm trying to answer a survey, and then I know. I know. It was a bit ridiculous. You kind of you know? But it was I can count them on one hand, probably less. You know? There were probably 2 or 3 that I can remember. So and I kept sharing we kept sharing it. And we got eventually got to I wanted to get over 200.

Liz Allan [00:35:47]:
So we got about 220 drivers, and the different iterations with this. We'd got under, I think we've got about 185 drivers; then I just got it in my head because of my neuro-spicy brain. I just thought, no. I need to have I need to have over 200. So I pushed it again, but we'd already pulled the data together. So then it was kind of a whole revamp. And actually, do you know what? At that point, Jess had done a massive piece of work with me for the 185. But then going it's not it doesn't sound many, but getting from 185 to 220, I then got involved because Jess had given me that support and understanding. And I manually went through every piece of information and pulled out everything I needed into the different areas of the white paper.

Liz Allan [00:36:44]:
And as I was doing this, I was writing. Right. Okay. This is what they're saying. So so I'll say to you now, I had asked them what the improvements the EV driver improvements, what they were, and what they wanted. The top one was user experience. They wanted a better user experience and convenience. That was about 20%, just over 20%.

Liz Allan [00:37:08]:
And then we kinda drilled down again. It was cost and pricing. But again, like I said, I think some of that is related to that education. There are some things that the operators can do to look at running pricing down possibly.

Kate Tyrrell [00:37:23]:
It is so important. Do you know how many times I've pulled up to a charge point and don't know what I will pay? Yeah. Until I've tapped my card. Sometimes, I don't know what I'm paying at all. It might be on an app, but it could be subject to change. Like Yeah. Yeah. I enjoy it when I pull into somewhere, and I think Gloucester services do this, and you can see the price per kilowatt hour as you're pulling around.

Kate Tyrrell [00:37:48]:
Something so visual, so similar to a driver like your petrol and diesel signs, you know, having that, you it's not a massive change for an EV driver because you're so used to seeing that. But, actually, why are we squirrelling away our prices? Why are we trying to hide that we're charging extortionate preauthorisation fees? Oh, that's that's ridiculous. Yeah. You know, preauthorisation fees should be a standard across the board. It should be there should be a maximum amount and a minimum amount, and £75, I'm sorry, is far too much, and you're just being greedy. That's ridiculous. I know that some operators will charge a pound just to make sure that your card is is working and it's active, and then they'll they'll charge you the rest, at the end of your charge. Some charge maybe £45, then they'll deduct the difference and refund you instantly.

Kate Tyrrell [00:38:42]:
But some operators will take up to 30 days to return your money. I have now been waiting almost 60 days to get my £45 pre-authorisation fee back from an operator, which is really frustrating. The week before Christmas, that paid for all my vegetables. Thank you very much. So it's kind of like that pricing and transparency are what we're so used to receiving. As ICE drivers, why aren't we doing that as EV drivers? And I don't care if you're 79p or 89p per kilowatt hour but give me a choice to make a more informed decision about whether I'm going to charge with you or not or at least understand if I've got enough money to get to 50% battery. Yeah. You know, it's you're making it more complicated by not being transparent.

Kate Tyrrell [00:39:33]:
It's just silly.

Liz Allan [00:39:35]:
I know if we look at the petrol stations when you've actually got using self-service at petrol stations, and they kind of automatically come up, doesn't it, with a £99, you know, pre-auth on there. But then that comes back straight away. And I know that there's something to do with the banking side that actually isn't fully sorted yet. And I know there's a lack of standardisation on the banking side. Which I know a lot of the operators are currently looking at. And it's driving them mad as well in some cases.

Kate Tyrrell [00:40:12]:
I know that Paythru did a white paper. I contributed to that earlier this year, and that was looking around, you know, transactions and how we make our payments and things like preauthorisation policies, etc. However, I do think that this is one that Charge UK need to be, taking the lead on and going to the House of Lords or whatever and saying, you know, we need legislation similar to that the petrol 4 courts are allowed to take, you know, up to £99. But they don't take it. They authorize it. They hold it.

Liz Allan [00:40:46]:
Yeah.

Kate Tyrrell [00:40:47]:
Transaction in the background. But they're not physically removing that money from your bank account. And then it comes back instantly. And it protects the brands because I appreciate, you know, that some people might charge and then run away knowing that they only put £1. But that is rare. So, the operators need better protections in place to secure their own profit margins, I guess. We need to move quicker as an industry to enforce such legislation that is coming out to protect those businesses. But in terms of advertising the price, you know, that's a really simple change.

Liz Allan [00:41:23]:
Absolutely. This and another part of the white paper that came out, and I agree with this because it totally aligns with my improvement background, which is standardisation. We're talking about standardisation across a multitude of charging areas. So we talked about it before we recorded, and I always talk about the initiation dance. Mhmm. You know, we are talking about multiple CPOs using different hardware. I get it. I do get it.

Liz Allan [00:41:55]:
Please don't think I don't. But it would be nice when we've got new people coming in, which, as the infrastructure expands and we get more EV drivers on board. Let's try and standardise it, for god's sake. Let's ensure you choose a plug-in, tap or tap, and plugin if you know you've got a plug-in. You know? If you can work with the hardware manufacturers and the software companies to make sure that that that is a seamless experience because I stood with somebody about a month ago now. It was the first time she'd ever used public charging.

Kate Tyrrell [00:42:32]:
Oh, no.

Liz Allan [00:42:32]:
And even I got the blooming process wrong.

Kate Tyrrell [00:42:37]:
I've done this as well. A couple of weeks ago, I stopped at, a services. There were multiple brands there, but I won't say who it was. What happened was she was having real difficulty. She'd moved along each charging bay and tried to plug in, but it was rejected. Oh, no. I know one. And I kinda get out of my car, and I'm like, hi.

Kate Tyrrell [00:42:59]:
Can I help you? Are you okay? Because she looks perplexed. And I couldn't; I couldn't do it. I called the customer service support line and he's like, are there any doors or windows open on the vehicle when you plug into the vehicle? And I'm like, what is this madness? So she's meant to make sure all of her windows are up. She's shut the car door. And they said, I'm sorry, but once the charger is initialised, she's gonna have to open the door again anyway. Is that going to interrupt the charging? No. No. Sometimes, the charger isn't happy if there's a door open when you're trying to calculate that communication.

Kate Tyrrell [00:43:36]:
I'm like, this is madness. Can we not just make sure you plug in and tap your card? That's fine. Done. Don't flash open your windows and doors and, you know, issues charging flat up or down? Like, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. And it isn't very clear even for experts in this industry, such as you and I, Liz. That's silly. I'm sorry. What was she like when you left her?

Liz Allan [00:44:04]:
Well, I knew her anyway and said I'll go with you to the charger. She didn't have a home charger, so it was literally public charging. And I didn't see I've. I'd like I say, I don't always see the if it's not on the charger, I don't always know, I don't always think about looking up to, you know, craning my neck to see where there's a sign that tells you what to do. I'd instead, it was kind of in front of me. It's on there or at least above it or something. And we worked out that because I was getting her to download the app, and I was, oh my god. Maybe it's because it's the first time you've charged. You know? We sussed it out.

Liz Allan [00:44:44]:
It was because we'd done it the wrong way around, and it wouldn't initiate. So it was, I think it was. We plugged in and then tapped, and it should have been tap and then plugged in. But, you know, we got there, and she was like, oh, this is great. I can now go and have a cup of coffee. So she knew what to do, and I told her about a couple of the aggregator apps you can use. So I was kinda saying these are the things you could use that might help you because using a kind of like Electraverse or ZapMap or something like that where you can initiate the charge from the app. Sometimes, it takes or uses an RFID, so we have an Electroverse RFID card. Doing something like that can sometimes make things a lot easier for people.

Liz Allan [00:45:34]:
But take that away. We've just gone. We've got contactless regs in there now in with the Charge Point regs. Let's standardise it and make sure it all works because we're just confusing people, which will aggravate them. And it just builds up that negativity.

Kate Tyrrell [00:45:57]:
Yeah.

Liz Allan [00:45:57]:
It really does.

Kate Tyrrell [00:45:58]:
It does. That's why simplifying that process and making it easy to understand what you need to do, like the 1, 2, and 3 steps to plug in and initiate your charge, is a Charge Safe inspection point of criteria. So we look at that because, for us, having signage or clear instructions is critical. Make sure that there are visuals to support that. Yeah. So, I'm sure that you would have seen, and it spun me out. My first charge experience was whether I went to Chademo or CCS. And it was only by visually checking what my plug was doing and what Yeah. I don't know what this is. Like it's like, oh, which plug do I need? Through that, just being printed on a sign or on the LED screens and knowing that now it will be like, oh, are you using CCS 1 or CCS 2 or CHAdeMO? That visual is really simple and helpful.

Kate Tyrrell [00:46:55]:
Tap, plugin, move on, like and how to win the charge. And there are still operators out there who will just let you press a stop button, which happened to me recently. I plugged in and went for a nice little walk around the lakes in the Cotswolds. And halfway around, I got a message from my Kona saying the charging was completed. I was like, it's blocked off.

Liz Allan [00:47:20]:
Stopped yours.

Kate Tyrrell [00:47:21]:
Yes. Someone had stopped my charge at 20%. I was like, no. I plugged in. I'm taking my dog for a lovely little walk, fully expecting to return when it is 80%. And Oh. I couldn't believe it. And why are we not saying, you know, you have to retap the payment method because only the driver's gonna be able to do that?

Kate Tyrrell [00:47:42]:
Mhmm. Oh, it made me so cross this.

Liz Allan [00:47:45]:
I was going to say I had a good experience last week, and this is an operator I've used twice. Brilliant l LED, you know, LCD, the display was fantastic. It's a split screen to tell you this is the right-hand side. Use that one. It's the left one. And it tells you as you're initiating, right, I need to do this. It's visual. It shows you step by step. Yeah.

Liz Allan [00:48:12]:
How do you plug in, do it, get it, and get the charge initiated? A young lad was opposite where I was, and I could tell he didn't know what he was doing. But he managed it because it was that step-by-step experience, and that's what we need. Yeah. You know, I was on my own. It was great. It was just, and in fact, I did an I put a video on, and we put it on, recorded a video, and put it on LinkedIn to say this was such a really, really seamless experience. I mean, the toilets were a bit crap because there was a women's well, there was one women's loo in a whole block, and it just had a code on the door.

Liz Allan [00:48:49]:
And I didn't. It didn't tell you where to find the women's loo, so I went to the men's. But, no, there was nobody else there. And it's a new block, and I was like, oh god. I just do whatever. You know? But the charging experience itself was seamless. So it's it's this this kind of stuff. And looking at accessibility because the screens were low and the bays were wider, I would not see any problem, you know, getting in and out of a vehicle if you're in a wheelchair or something like that or you're a mom with a buggy.

Kate Tyrrell [00:49:25]:
And, you know, this is something that gets said often. If we make the base accessible, it benefits everyone. Everyone gets to benefit from having that extra bit of space, you know, or being able to reach everything nice and seamlessly on the charging screen. The cables being at a better height, you do not have to exert yourself too much to to plug into your vehicle. Yeah. So, as you know, I would be a big advocate for Oh.

Liz Allan [00:49:52]:
Improving the Absolutely. I mean, these cables are heavy as well, aren't they? I've written a whole thing on, on cables and the cable management, and I've actually whacked myself in the face with a cable one time in the freezing cold because I slipped slightly, and I thought, oh my god. I've given myself a fat lip.

Kate Tyrrell [00:50:12]:
Yeah. You know? I caught my nose before because the pressure on the cable made it swing back and hit me in the face, and it was a real shock. So I'm glad every time I tell that story, people laugh, and I'm like, no. I was really hurt. Like, that was really awful. So I'm glad I had that Sorry, Liz. But, it's No.

Liz Allan [00:50:33]:
No. Seriously. there are things like that, you know, that we just have to make these experiences for drivers simpler, and that's one of the things I was gonna talk about as well. You know, kind of simplifying that journey actually will increase utilisation because you will increase trust with those drivers because they'll know that, hey, you've got your wider base. You've put cable management in place. You've made an effort. You are your experience for that driver is seamless. The work that I do for Full Circle is different to the work that you do for Charge Safe, but the outcome I want to be the same.

Liz Allan [00:51:18]:
So my work is what happened in the business for that to be the outcome? And what can we do to improve what's going on in the business? And sometimes it'll go right back to that business development sale; that salesperson going in and the landowner going, no. No. We don't; we've got so many bays. We're not gonna go. We're not gonna make them any wider at all. And that conversation piece with the, and I know it's not always possible, so there'll be people shaking their heads on this one. No. It's not always possible because landowners are landowners, aren't they? But, actually, that conversation piece with them to say, you know, look. You know what? If you make them this much bigger, you're gonna make it inclusive for everybody.

Kate Tyrrell [00:52:06]:
Yeah. 100%. And I think, you know, it's a nice point that you touched on there. Our businesses are very different, but both have a similar outcome. You're looking at everything internally to create a better external customer journey. I'm supporting in terms of the layout, design, user experience, safety accessibility, and if it's appropriate for the fleet to be able to use those charge points. Our accreditation gives them the tools to make better decisions and to have stronger conversations at that point. 

Kate Tyrrell [00:52:54]:
So our accreditation looks at, you know, this is everything we're looking at in our inspection criteria, all 144 points, and this is the difference between the inspection criteria, all 144 points. And this is the difference between whether you are marked as a 1 star or a 5 star on each point. And I think it's you see, like, a light bulb goes off when you're delivering the accreditation, and you've got project managers in the room and site acquisition, managers and project managers and the salespeople and the marketing team, and they're like, ah, okay. That makes so much sense because I'm here to support you guys. And the best thing I can do is give you as much of that knowledge to feel more confident when you're having these conversations at the site acquisition stage to say, hey. Did you know about the Equality Act and what that's gonna mean for you? As the person acquiring, you know, the site, you are legally responsible for ensuring that this is accessible, and this is what Charge Safe recommends. And for you, you're in the background going, well, yeah. So who's having who's making these decisions? Where is this coming from?

Liz Allan [00:53:58]:
And Why are they making these decisions specifically? Decisions and what they are: What's happened, and how can we improve it?

Kate Tyrrell [00:54:04]:
Yeah. Exactly. So we're we're just complementing each other the whole way. We do.

Liz Allan [00:54:08]:
We do. You know, there is something that we haven't touched on yet, and I wanted to bring this up. And it's customer service or customer support and user feedback. So that came up as a theme constantly during the white paper. And I did ask the question. I said, what's your overall satisfaction with customer support? Now, we did have quite a high level of people who said that they were satisfied, but then we still had nearly 35% of people who weren't necessarily happy with the customer support they were receiving if they had a problem with a charger. And some of it that was coming back was saying it was the person on the other end of the phone that couldn't advise them or didn't advise them appropriately. The system had already said for example, one guy had said the system said it just needed to do a reset.

Liz Allan [00:55:05]:
But they were saying no. You've got to go to a different charger.

Kate Tyrrell [00:55:07]:
Staff training. That's that's what it comes down to. It's how well-trained your staff are and how knowledgeable they are. I've had some ridiculous experiences, and the one that made me the most angry was when I called an operator. It was the phone number available on the bollard because it was one of those street lighting situations, and it was also on their app because I was trying to initiate the charge via the app. So I knew they were the same telephone number, called the telephone number, and was told we no longer take calls for them. Oh, god. And I was like, great. So, who does? Because I need to charge, I don't know how to do this.

Kate Tyrrell [00:55:49]:
And they were like, oh, we don't know. And I was like, I wanna speak to your manager. They can put it on your manager. Yeah.

Kate Tyrrell [00:55:55]:
And for me, Liz, it isn't easy because I come from a call service a call centre background. I used to run call centres for luxury brands all the way to utilities and beauty products. So, I am well versed in excellence in customer service. And if you don't have an answer, you put your caller on hold. You find. Yeah. An answer. And I was just like, someone's got to know who I can call. And they were like, oh, you know, we, we've stopped their contract.

Kate Tyrrell [00:56:26]:
We're not taking calls for them anymore. So Oh,

Liz Allan [00:56:28]:
How unprofessional is that?

Kate Tyrrell [00:56:30]:
And I'm like, that's ridiculous. So why, at the point where you are exchanging contracts from one call centre to another, are you not ensuring that there's a seamless handover, which is where you would come in with full circle and say, you know, there has to be a seamless transition from one provider to the next. Mhmm. The next lot taking those calls, whether internal or an external, contracted provider, must be fully trained in every solution to every particular problem. And if it's something that hasn't been seen before, we're incredibly sorry. This is something that we haven't actually come up against before. We're going to log it and get a technician out to visit. In the meantime, this is where you can go.

Kate Tyrrell [00:57:11]:
You know, just that explanation, signposting, showing understanding, it's so simple and a lot of these providers I mean, fair play, they're probably not call centre specialists. But if you're going to outsource that, ensure you get a very good quality provider or bring the operation in-house. You know, you have a team of technicians. Yeah. They're available to take those calls when they're not out and about in the field, maybe because they're gonna know. They might need some polish if they're your typical engineers. 

Liz Allan [00:57:44]:
I'm the same as you. Yeah. My background original background is in customer service. Yeah. You know? And I would say that's been ingrained in me. It's like that, you know, the phone shouldn't ring for any longer than two rings. I'm that kind of person, you know, and I've been at the other end.

Liz Allan [00:58:06]:
So I worked in, in service in kind of like a service background. So I was working in car parking equipment. I've worked with car parking equipment and various other things. So, I know how a service operation works. I understand what same as you, I know what good customer service looks and sound sounds like. And I was one of those, and, again, it's probably because of my neurospicy brain. But our company or companies that I worked for, if I were working on the service support side, I'd always go and find out what it looked like and how it worked to be able to explain it to that person on the phone. Okay.

Liz Allan [00:58:47]:
So this is what's happening? Blah blah blah. Okay. So what you could possibly do is give them that full support. But I made sure I knew, which is what I would say. I've written something again about this recently. If you've got people if you're a CPO, a charge point operator, and people working with you who don't drive EVs. They don't understand that that charging experience, please, you know, if you're running customer support, you know, or even if you're if you if you've got it outsourced to a third party, make sure that third party has trained their staff in you know, they've taken them out in EVs and they know what the charging experience is like. Because otherwise, how can you give a good service without, you know, without knowing that? There's limited information that you can take. And the other thing I would also say, if you are outsourcing or even doing this in-house, make sure that you're running regular reports about those customer support calls you've got.

Liz Allan [00:59:48]:
Yeah. Follow the themes. Pull out some FAQs that if you need to share with, you know, with the team, make sure that that that information is available and you know that your team will so you're using the data to find out what people are asking. You're building, you know, kind of your frequently asked questions and ensuring that you're training your team to answer those questions whether you're in-house or outsourcing. And I do have a question about outsourcing. There are some really good outsourcing companies, but, it's about right. Okay. You're paying this outsourcing company.

Liz Allan [01:00:28]:
How much will it cost you? And is it worth it being in-house? Because bringing it in-house is all under your control then.

Liz Allan [01:00:38]:
I know it's 24/7.

Kate Tyrrell [01:00:40]:
You know, the value of the level of experience of your products, having that as an internal function, I think, is invaluable. It has to be done. I understand that smaller businesses might want to outsource that because, operationally, it's just impossible even to offer a 24/7 service. You might want to do something where you use an overseas client to ensure that you're getting that, you know, 24-hour clock coverage. But I think, and I know that we discussed this very briefly before we started recording. And actually, something that I thought was a bloody good idea is we were both a part of the EV rally earlier this year. Women Drive Electric, the winning team, by the way. Woo woo.

Kate Tyrrell [01:01:26]:
And the team is excellent. We loved it. The really interesting thing that I witnessed over that week was that one of the teams, Ovo, swapped their team members out every day.

Kate Tyrrell [01:01:41]:
New team members had a day experience on the EV rally, and it must have been chaotic to organie that. But Yeah. Fantastic experience. And I think even taking a leaf out of their book, you know, Send your new team members out as part of their induction for a day, a day trip, long distance. Send them in a car, in, you know, teams of 2 to 4, whatever. Pop them in a a company, EV, let them go, and let them experience and troubleshoot their own way to and from, that that site. Because that experience, you really can't replicate that in an opposite environment. You have to go through the stresses of not knowing if you've used the right payment method, if you've picked the right charger.

Kate Tyrrell [01:02:29]:
I mean, the first charger I ever used was 22 kilowatt, and and you can't expect to leave within 40 minutes on a 22. So, you know, I think that's, that's really important being able to take them out of that business. When you're working with, these companies, Liz, is that something that you you recommend? Is that something that has changed, in fact, since doing this white paper? Is that something you've now built into your your, I guess, your your toolkit?

Liz Allan [01:02:57]:
Well, the education piece, it depend I suppose it depends what area they're that they're actually looking looking at. But, yeah, actually, I am now totally advocating to get people, you know, get their teams in, as you're saying, you know, put them in a vehicle, if you've got them put them in a vehicle, if they're on the phones put them in a vehicle, just get them out there so so yeah it depends, like you say, it depends what they're what we're looking at to what we're, you know, the advice that we're giving. But if it's to do with customer support and they want to bring it in-house or because that's the other thing. Like you said, it's about looking at the financial implications behind bringing it in-house. Sometimes, you like you say, so the trade-off between having it outsourced and in-house could be your reputation.

Kate Tyrrell [01:03:50]:
Yeah. Which is important

Liz Allan [01:03:52]:
Yeah.

Liz Allan [01:03:53]:
When it comes around, So, there are a lot of things that I do around that, but I think, do you know what? It's more about over time, I've understood more about the journey I want to take as an EV driver and what I want that experience to look like. But also because of the information I've got from the white paper, my god, and the survey, it's been amazing. If I look at where I was when I first started putting this out in January this year to where I am now, it's a very different place. I've learned so much, and I always say I'm like a sponge. I love learning. That's the kind of person I am. But on the other side, the same goes for this podcast: when I learn something, I wanna share it.

Kate Tyrrell [01:04:42]:
Yeah.

Liz Allan [01:04:44]:
That's just how I am the person I am. And if part of this is making improvements, sharing information to help improvements happen, and integrating, then, you know, that's all the better. If somebody takes a little nugget or two from this podcast, I'd be happy, seriously. Of course, I'd be even happy if they came to me and asked me to help them. Ask Full Circle to help them. You know, that that's very that's very different. Yeah. I haven't let you ask any more questions, have I?

Kate Tyrrell [01:05:17]:
I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I think just to, again, mop up and summarise everything that we've discussed. So for you, critical points to focus on that you have extracted from your white paper would include what customer support functions are available, how simple is the process of plugging in and charging, how visible the pricing is, and how accessible sites are, how convenient they are to locate. Reliability factors in really heavily, and there's so much more that I know you and the team at Full Circle do behind the scenes to work with businesses to improve their efficiency in their processes. So, that has got to be mentioned. In terms of the one thing that anybody listening to right now who's like, this white paper sounds really interesting. Maybe I will go and find it.

Kate Tyrrell [01:06:13]:
Firstly, where can they find the white paper if they want to read it? Will you be able to link it to the show notes? Or

Liz Allan [01:06:19]:
I will.

Kate Tyrrell [01:06:20]:
Yeah? Okay. Great. So, if you're interested in reading all 35 pages, you have more patience.

Liz Allan [01:06:26]:
Or just just glance through it.

Kate Tyrrell [01:06:29]:
Go do that. But there is also another critical tool you have developed, which helps these businesses understand and get very real, harsh honesty, reality check. Where is your business at? What is this incredible invention that you've made, Liz? Tell us what about it.

Liz Allan [01:06:49]:
Bless you. So we've got a diagnostic tool called "Charge Up Your Success". So, it was explicitly developed for Charge Point operators, and it takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. There are 22 questions in there. These questions are based on the customer journey, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, current processes, and customer feedback. So the idea is that you answer all those questions, and you must be honest. Because if you're not honest, I'm not interested here.

Kate Tyrrell [01:07:21]:
Like, no. And I also think what's important is that this is anonymous. Like, nobody will see that you from business A has spoken about. And what's their agenda? A. Liz sees the results, but she won't publish it. Don't lie. There's no point. Tell the truth if you want to improve your business and understand where you're at. Sorry, Liz.

Kate Tyrrell [01:07:43]:
Carry on.

Liz Allan [01:07:44]:
No. No. Right. So, if you want to access the diagnostics, it's in our it's in our services section of the website. It will be put on the website as a banner, and the white paper will be on as a banner. But you will just have to sign your no. You are not signing your life away, but you need to fill in some information. But to charge up your success diagnostic, I made sure I put it on the page where you first see it.

Liz Allan [01:08:10]:
This is confidential. There's no way that this is being shared with anybody. It is not being put into a survey. This is for us to have a conversation afterwards. The idea is that you complete the 22 questions. At the end of it, you get a little donut chart that gives you your percentages, and it comes up as a RAG status, which is red, amber, green. So, if you fall in the red in any specific sections, you're looking at the right. Okay.

Liz Allan [01:08:36]:
These are areas that urgently need attention. If you're in amber, then that's okay. It's alright, but you need to improve on this. And there's a little bit of guidance as well. If you're in green, the idea is right. Okay. That's pretty good. There's probably a little bit of room for improvement, but green is kind of like if you're in red or amber; green is what we're aiming for.

Liz Allan [01:08:58]:
So what it does is it gives me a baseline, and I can see that there's a dashboard. I can see exactly what those answers have been. And the best bit is if you get multiple people from the same organisation answering those 22 questions, you get very different answers sometimes. So that's another conversation about why you are all on different pages. Is it because I'm very much into communication? Is it because you are so focused on what you're doing in your department operations, service, finance, sales, or whatever? Is it because you're so focused, you think it's this? This you think we look like this. That person thinks, oh, we will look a bit like that. You know? So, it brings all those conversations together. It's an excellent place to start place.

Kate Tyrrell [01:09:45]:
That's a a really, really much more of a deeper communication internal comms issue as well, isn't it? When you've got Yeah. Departments working in silos and not actually coming together for this aligned mission. Even having a mission statement and company values can make a difference, but what happens if you're all going off and you're picking one thing that you like from that and then you're all working to a different tangent? S

Kate Tyrrell [01:10:56]:
The one thing that you definitely should prioritise is if you are involved at any point in the, delivery of the UK's charging infrastructure, just do the diagnostic. Because if nothing else, that red, amber, green system is going to help you as a business prioritise the areas that you must focus on and give you that, you know, a reality check that you probably need just to align your 2025. You know, we're coming into a new year. It's gonna be a big year for the EV charging infrastructure industry. I wish everyone the very best of success with it. But if there's one thing that you can do to prepare yourself, it's that diagnostic. So, get that done. Liz, we have droned on for a little bit too long.

Liz Allan [01:11:44]:
We've had just a bit.

Kate Tyrrell [01:11:45]:
Very random things pop up in this chat. But the one takeaway, the biggest thing that would make maximum difference from your white paper, go!

Liz Allan [01:11:57]:
Make sure that you, as a charge point operator, provide as much of a seamless experience as possible. Think about that person plugging in. It's not just about the increase in utilisation. You won't get utilisation if you don't engage with people who are plugging in and ensure you're giving them the service they need. As we increase the number of EVs and drivers in the UK, you've to do this. Really gotta do this. Think of the driver. Work with the drivers and work if you wanna come to me and work with Full Circle; that's what we do.

Liz Allan [01:12:38]:
We will help you to get there to prioritise and make those incremental changes to get where you need to be because it's so important. Let's get rid of some of that negativity by building trust with the drivers.

Kate Tyrrell [01:12:52]:
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Liz. You've done incredible work with this white paper and your podcast. You're always at a networking event. We can't get rid of you. So

Liz Allan [01:13:02]:
Yeah. Sorry.

Kate Tyrrell [01:13:04]:
Your experience is incredibly valuable. The continuous improvement, you know, bringing that into a whole new industry, just shows that you must be an expert because it takes real experts to apply themselves to different markets while carrying that same foundation of tools to create that positive change. So I adore you, as you know. Thank you so much for having me on.

Liz Allan [01:13:32]:
I loved it. I was very nervous at first. I will say that again, but it's been great, and yes, we've covered a lot of different things. I hope that the experiences Kate and I have been discussing have resonated with some of you watching and listening because we're doing pretty well. The infrastructure is doing pretty well, but we can make it good. We can make it seamless. We can make it brilliant. And I am a passionate advocate of this sector and decarbonisation in general. I wanna do this for the right reasons. I'm not full of bull.

Liz Allan [01:14:09]:
I'm really not, and you're not. And you are doing fantastic work with Charge Safe as well, Kate. So, if you've not engaged with Kate already, please do. Let's pull all of this together to make it inclusive for everybody and seamless. That's what I'd like to end on.

Kate Tyrrell [01:14:27]:
Fab. What a nice way to end it, Liz. Thank you so much.

Liz Allan [01:14:30]:
Obviously, we've talked a lot. We've talked a lot about the charging situation. I think if you can share this, I always say this now. If you can share this, you can subscribe to YouTube if you download it or make comments on our post on LinkedIn or wherever you know; we share it everywhere; please do. Let's get the word out there. Let's talk about it. These subjects, there's a lot of negativity around variety of different subjects.

Liz Allan [01:15:02]:
Let's get the truth out there. I sound like something from the X files now, don't I?

Liz Allan [01:15:09]:
But listen, on that note, thank you for listening and watching. Thanks to Kate. It's been a wonderful experience. I appreciate your time, my darling. Thank you. And to everybody else, see you later next time. Bye.