EV Charger CMS Features

Drivers

The party a network cannot afford to lose, and the one most platforms treat as a mobile app problem rather than as a platform problem.

1. 1

   Find and see

   Where the chargers are, which are free now, what they cost before arriving rather than after leaving.

2. 2

   Start and stop

   From the app, from a conversation, from an RFID card, from a call. The platform should not care which.

3. 3

   Reserve

   A bay held for an arrival time, with the rules about what happens when they are late decided in advance rather than argued about afterwards.

4. 4

   Pay

   The gateway, the receipt, the invoice, the refund when a session failed. A failed session that still charges the driver costs more than the session was worth.

5. 5

   Their own history

   Sessions, spend, and where they charge. This is also what makes a battery report or a personalised offer possible at all.

6. 6

   Be recognised

   A driver on their eighth session is a different customer from one on their first, and the platform is the only thing that knows.

Site hosts

The party that signs the agreement and decides whether to sign it again. Hosts churn quietly: they do not complain, they just decline at renewal.

1. 1

   Their chargers, and only theirs

   Scoped so a host sees their own sites in full and no other host's at all.

2. 2

   What was earned

   Sessions, energy and revenue on their units, in a form they can check rather than take on trust.

3. 3

   Reconciliation

   What the platform recorded against what actually settled, so the monthly conversation is a review and not an investigation.

4. 4

   Invoices and billing

   Generated, delivered and correct, including the revenue share arrangement and the tax treatment for their market.

5. 5

   Utilisation they can act on

   Not a chart. Which hours are busy, which bays are not earning, and whether that is demand or a fault.

A host who can answer their own questions without emailing you is a host who renews. It is the cheapest retention there is.

Installers

The party platforms do not build for, which is why so many sites have no usable record of how they were commissioned.

1. 1

   The installation process, as software

   Step by step through wiring, cabling, earthing, accessories and the photographs, rather than a paper form that ends up in a drawer.

2. 2

   A checklist that produces data

   Each step recorded as it is completed, so the commissioning record is queryable later. This is what makes a fault diagnosable two years on.

3. 3

   The units they are responsible for

   Scoped to their own jobs, across sites and across customers.

4. 4

   Maintenance work

   The job, what was found, what was done, the parts used, and what should be scheduled next.

The chargers themselves

1. 1

   Station management

   Live state, session state, and the site conditions around the unit where station hardware is fitted.

2. 2

   Faults, with enough to act on

   What happened, on which unit, what ran before it, and what it did the last three times. Everything the platform cannot tell you remotely becomes a site visit, and site visits are what a network costs to run.

3. 3

   Asset records

   Serial, model, firmware, location, warranty, and the fact that units get moved and swapped.

4. 4

   Maintenance history as a pattern

   One unit failing is an incident. The same unit failing four times is a decision about replacement.

5. 5

   A knowledge base for mixed fleets

   Fault codes mean different things on different makes, and a technician needs the procedure for the unit actually in front of them.

6. 6

   An OCPP gateway

   So chargers from different manufacturers, on different OCPP versions, connect to one platform without each one becoming a special case.

Operators, and who is allowed to see what

The administrator's view is every other view at once, which makes scoping the feature rather than an afterthought.

1. 1

   Roles that mean something

   A host, an installer, a support agent and a network administrator need genuinely different access, not the same screen with buttons hidden.

2. 2

   Multi-tenancy

   Several operators, or several hosts under one operator, sharing infrastructure without sharing data.

3. 3

   An audit trail

   Who changed a tariff, who restarted a charger, who issued a refund. This matters most on the day an auditor asks.

4. 4

   Support with the context attached

   An agent answering a driver should not be opening three systems to see one session.

Tickets the platform raises by itself

The single most valuable thing a platform does, and the one most often missing. A ticket should exist because the network noticed, not because a driver was annoyed enough to call.

1. 1

   A charger that has stopped talking

   No communication for a defined period is a ticket, whether or not a driver has tried to use the unit. Nothing else will tell you.

2. 2

   A site that has stopped earning

   A location with no sessions for a period it normally charges in is an operational ticket in its own right. It may be a fault that does not report, it may be access to the site, it may be the location itself. All three are worth knowing and none of them appears as an error.

3. 3

   Grouping duplicate events

   Ten events from one outage are one ticket with ten pieces of evidence, not ten tickets.

4. 4

   Categorised on creation

   Sorted into the kind of problem it is, and routed on that, so the operations team is working a queue rather than reading a log.

The second one is the case operators most often have no answer to. A charger reporting healthy at a site no driver has used in three weeks is not a healthy site, and only the platform is in a position to notice.

A voice agent with the platform behind it

A support line automated without access to the platform can be polite and nothing else. The value is entirely in what it can see.

1. 1

   It answers from live data

   The session, the charger state, the payment record, the driver's own history. Most support calls are questions the platform can already answer.

2. 2

   It can act, once the caller is authenticated

   A remote start or stop, scoped to that caller's own session.

3. 3

   It covers the unstaffed hours

   Which is when a large share of charging happens, and when a support line is otherwise a voicemail box.

Money, and connecting to other networks

1. 1

   Tariffs that express what you actually charge

   Time bands, user groups, session and idle fees, minimum charges, and the correct tax treatment for the market. Every platform does per-kWh pricing. Far fewer do a real tariff.

2. 2

   Offers and discounts

   Targeted at a driver, a site, a group or a time of day. This is the instrument for bringing a driver back, and a platform that cannot express an offer cannot run a retention programme.

3. 3

   Transactions and settlement

   What each session was worth, what was authorised, what settled, and what did not, held so the three can be compared.

4. 4

   Payment gateways

   More than one, because markets differ and a gateway that is down is a site that cannot take money.

5. 5

   Roaming over OCPI

   So drivers from other networks can charge on yours and yours can charge elsewhere, with the settlement between operators handled rather than reconciled by hand.

6. 6

   Revenue share

   The host's cut, calculated from the same session records the host can see, which is what keeps that conversation short.

The number that decides whether a network compounds

Everything above resolves into one question: does a driver who charged once charge again.

A site earns from repeat traffic, not from first visits. A driver whose first session failed, or who could not pay, or who was never given a reason to return, is a driver the site paid to acquire and did not keep. Enough of those and the site underperforms, the host looks at the revenue share and declines to renew, and the network loses a location it already paid to build.

Which is why churn belongs in a feature list. The platform is where a first session becomes a second one: it is what notices the failed session, what follows it up, what carries the offer, and what tells you whether any of it worked. A platform that cannot do that is a charger dashboard with a payment screen attached.