Green Flag: Delivering fast and stress-free roadside assistance to customers, wherever they are
About Green Flag
Part of the Direct Line Group, Green Flag is a British roadside assistance and recovery service operating a smart network of rescue specialists to help stranded customers across the UK and Europe.
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About Web Geo Services
Google Cloud Premier Partner Web Geo Services supports a wide range of international companies to optimize the deployment of Google Maps Platform in high value-added applications.
By leveraging Google Maps Platform, Green Flag uses location data to determine where customers are when they need help, creating a stress-free customer journey and providing roadside assistance faster.
Results:
- Enables a stress-free customer journey by not requiring them to provide an address to receive help
- Easily determines where customers are stranded by querying points of interest near them
- Speeds up the delivery of roadside assistance with optimized route calculation that helps technicians reach customers in need
Helps locate stranded customers to assist them faster
Picture this: You’re on your way to an important appointment, to pick up kids from school, or to catch a train, and you find yourself stranded instead, blocking traffic in your broken car. How do you get help? First, you need to understand your location. Unfortunately, that’s not as easy to determine when caught off-guard somewhere unfamiliar. If that’s the case, being asked ‘where are you?’ places the onus on you to determine where you are, which only adds tension to an already stressful situation. Picking up on this insight, roadside assistance and vehicle recovery provider Green Flag is able to remove that stress from its customers.
“Our mission is to make our customers’ lives easier, and that starts when they call us for help,” says Blanche Oseland, Digital Platform Product Manager at Green Flag. “Our front-line support team has understood that if the question ‘where are you?’ is difficult to answer, it only adds another layer of tension for our customers. On top of having to deal with the incident they now worry about keeping you waiting on the line while they try to find themselves on a map or walk around looking for road signs. And that’s simply not the kind of experience we want for them,” she explains.
“Accurate, timely location data helps us to determine where our customers are when they need help. For this, we wanted to partner with a mature location platform that gives us flexibility to switch features on and off as we develop our infrastructure, and Google Maps Platform is a clear winner.”
—Shakeel Butt , Technology and Delivery Lead, Green FlagTo address this challenge, Green Flag decided to leverage location data instead of asking customers for an address. The company wanted to query generic landscape descriptors that could help them determine where to send help faster without adding any stress to the customer journey. To access the data and tools needed to enable this service, Green Flag turned to Google Maps Platform.
“Accurate, timely location data helps us to determine where our customers are when they need help. For this, we wanted to select a mature location platform that gives us flexibility to switch features on and off as we develop our infrastructure, and Google Maps Platform is a clear winner,” explains Shakeel Butt, Technology and Delivery Lead at Green Flag, of the decision.
Designing a road map for helping customers faster
It all officially started in 2018, when the arrival of a new Managing Director led Green Flag to reassess its goals and ambitions as a business. Shakeel, who was already in charge of providing the technology to support the business, realized that it was time to reassess the infrastructure, too. “Green Flag has been around for 50 years. Like many long-established companies, we’ve been holding on to some technology that we’ve been using for a good portion of that time. As a result, we were limited in the flexibility we needed to act quickly when we spot an opportunity to transform or improve our services and internal processes,” he explains.
“With a comprehensive database of more than 150 million regularly updated points of interest worldwide, the Places API is really helping us to hone in on a customer’s location wherever they might be. By simply asking them to look around, we can locate them so much faster.”
—Blanche Oseland , Digital Platform Product Manager, Green FlagWith the goal to remove technology as an impediment from any business decision that had to be made now or in the future, Green Flag kicked off a five-year digital transformation program to rebuild Green Flag’s entire technology stack from the ground up. One of the program’s priorities is to establish a new ecosystem integrated with Google Maps Platform and other solutions that support the company’s mission of using location data to help customers faster. “We kicked off this transformation program knowing that Google Maps Platform was key to our design,” says Shakeel.
To ensure the success of the project, Green Flag sought out advice from Web Geo Services, a Google Cloud Premier Partner specializing in location-based services. “The Web Geo Services team quickly understood our requirements and provided the right introductions with the relevant people from the Google Maps Platform team. They even orchestrated a couple of feature roadmapping sessions at the Google office, which our team loved. This helped us to define our roadmap across a number of different platforms using the internal brainstorming approach used by the team at Google. It’s been an excellent learning journey for us,” Shakeel shares.
Placing the customer first at every step of the way
Today, some aspects of the new system are already up and running. Green Flag call center agents use it to receive rescue claims from customers and access Places API to determine where customers are stranded without having to ask them for an address. Instead, agents can ask customers to simply look around and describe their surroundings. By querying landmarks, names of buildings, shops, or anything distinctive about the landscape, Green Flag agents can locate customers and activate the closest rescue specialist to help them any time of the day, any day of the year.
“With a comprehensive database of more than 150 million regularly updated points of interest worldwide, the Places API is really helping us to hone in on a customer’s location wherever they might be. By simply asking them to look around, we can locate them so much faster,” shares Blanche.
Previously, despite having highly skilled front-line employees in its support centre, it could take a considerable amount of time for Green Flag to get location information from customers. Now, Green Flag can reassure its customers that it knows where they are and that help is on the way, even if the only thing they see is an unknown hotel in a little town ‘in the middle of nowhere’,” Blanche explains.
Making way for more innovation
As a business moved by the motto ‘common sense to the rescue’, Green Flag is always looking for opportunities to improve its services and platform interfaces based on the needs of its customers, employees, and its network of local rescue specialists. Other than comprehensive information about the available road assistance services and how to access them, Green Flag’s website also features a route planner to help drivers get to their destinations efficiently. A customized map, embedded on the website with the Maps JavaScript API, shows accurate directions from point A to B, helping them to keep on track.
“There are many exciting capabilities we want to enable across our ecosystem of customers, employees, and local rescue specialists. With Google Maps Platform, our ideas suddenly become possible. It gives us the location data and tools we need to switch them on at the right time across our journey.”
—Shakeel Butt , Technology and Delivery Lead, Green FlagOne of the ideas on the company’s radar is connecting local technicians with customers directly via the Green Flag mobile app, using the Directions API to help them find each other easily and the Distance Matrix API to calculate and optimize the distance and time between them. “Google Maps Platform can help us link local technicians with customers near them with smart route planning capabilities that show real-time traffic updates. The aim is to enable technicians to arrive at the customers’ location sooner, and to give customers full visibility of that process while they wait for help,” Shakeel explains.
“There are many exciting capabilities we want to enable across our ecosystem of customers, employees, and local rescue specialists. With Google Maps Platform, our ideas suddenly become possible. It gives us the location data and tools we need to switch them on at the right time across our journey,” he concludes.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Green Flag
Part of the Direct Line Group, Green Flag is a British roadside assistance and recovery service operating a smart network of rescue specialists to help stranded customers across the UK and Europe.
About Web Geo Services
Google Cloud Premier Partner Web Geo Services supports a wide range of international companies to optimize the deployment of Google Maps Platform in high value-added applications.