Intelematics speeds up customer onboarding process with automation

Mobility data provider Intelematics has recently shifted its manual-based customer onboarding process to an automated one in a move to improve internal processes and customer service.

The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV)-owned company worked with Mulesoft to introduce Anypoint Platform to its technology stack, after realising that relying on a manual system to onboard customers to its traffic intelligence capability was no  longer sufficient.

"Our products are very contemporary, very modular, and API-driven solutions built from the ground up using the latest technology," Intelematics CEO Nick Marks told ZDNet.

"With our traffic intelligence capability specifically, the onboarding process for new customers was quite a manual and laborious task that involved such things as registration and granting portal access, so we decided that it was a great opportunity to automate and streamline that process."

The process that previously took up to half a day has been reduced to 15 minutes, Marks said.

"It's a much better experience not only for internal staff in operations but our customers. They're firing off with confirmation emails because that process is now all very streamlined," he added.

But making this switch is only one of a number of projects that have been underway at Intelematics as part of the organisations' wider digital transformation program that has been ongoing for the last five years.

The company has also been slowly building out its microservices architecture to reduce silos that previously existed between its four main products: traffic intelligence analytics platform, connected vehicle and fleet management platform, safety and security platform, and mobility service platform.  

"Fundamentally, they have a whole bunch of common data and foundation and use GIS [geographic information system] or mapping in one form or another. Of course, there's reporting, SLA [service level agreement] tracking, authorisation access control, so really to bring all that together and create a common platform right across all of our product sets, we could only do that through APIs and microservices. For us, Mulesoft is critical to really enable us to do that," Marks said.

Taking this approach meant the company avoided the need to rebuild any of its product architectures, Marks said.

"There's a lot of efficiency to be gained from that. That's why we adopted a very strong microservices architecture to be able to interlink the common elements together and choreograph them in such a way they deliver the functionality, without rebuilding and refactoring the unique architecture for each product line."

What prompted the company to change, according to Marks, was realising how much "technical debt" Intelematics had accrued from building its products in the first place.

"Along the course of that journey, you build technical debt at the expense of speed of build. As our product matured and started to get that product market fit, we've determined that now it's time to step back a little bit and pay down the principle on that technical debt," he explained.  

Off the back of eliminating silos, Marks said Intelematics has formed a central data team to assist the company with deriving data from its track intelligence platform, which houses upwards of 2 trillion data points, for instance. The team is also responsible for ensuring that there's no downtime between customers requesting information and accessing it.

"In the past, the teams were organised, self-sufficient and multidisciplinary. We then decided to create a central data function that canvasses all the needs right across the product lines from data engineering, data architecture, and visualisation. That was a really important step to take really help facilitate and speed up the process," Marks said. 

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