The Campaign For Happy Chargers

This week, we are kicking off a campaign to create happy chargers. In this article, we introduce what makes a happy charger, and over the next few weeks, we'll dive into the detail of how successful CPOs create happy chargers....

Here at Dodona, we are passionate about happy chargers, and for us, a happy charger has two meanings; the first refers to the customer and their experience as the end consumer we all serve in the EV charging industry (a point of particular pride for our clients). The second, of course, is the charge point itself.

It’s a calling, a mission, a campaign; it is why we at Dodona fire up our laptops (or incredibly geeky Linux desktops) in the morning - to create happy chargers. In this content series, we share with you what this means for us, our clients, and those happy chargers. 

Happy chargers?

OK, despite the efforts of the brilliant folk in our development team and across the EV software industry, we have yet to bestow upon the machines that charge our EVs actual feelings. 

But, to us, a happy charger is in the right place, loved by its customers, is happily humming away with high utilization, feels attentively maintained, and is smiled upon by an operator with no regrets about the cost and labor that brought it into the world. 

What makes a happy charger?

If we were to sum up what makes a happy charger, it’s location. 

In the Bible (or the film Field of Dreams), we were told to “build it, and they will come.” However, this is terrible advice for EV charger planning because sometimes, they really don’t. Trust us; we have data and stories of unhappy, expensive, and underutilized chargers installed based on guesswork and hunches. 

However, this is not as simple as a quick Google search to see if there are any nearby chargers or even how many EV owners live in the area; it’s an increasingly complex equation of viability (the costs and profitability of the site) and feasibility (the operational challenges of getting the charger into the ground). 

This happiness index of feasibility and viability (often described by the questions “Could we?” and “Should we?”) is very specific to the operator, the equipment being installed, the target consumer, their strengths as a business, and the model for investment and monetization.   

Plus, of course, we need to do all this while meeting the needs of our other happy chargers, the people who own the EVs and who crave convenience. They need to be able to shop, work, drink coffee, and generally get on with their lives while they charge and feel safe while doing it.

Do spreadsheets make happy chargers?

It’s complicated. 

No, really, it’s really complicated.

For each site, there could be dozens of granular data points to consider, with varying levels of importance, priority, and relevance. Some are easy to source and import, and some are harder and need some work.

And yes, this kind of analysis naturally starts in a spreadsheet but becomes more of a challenge if you are trying to decide on the location of hundreds or maybe thousands of happy chargers for your happy chargers. 

And if you are a charge point operator, you want to be operating chargers, not distracted from growing your network and business while you wrangle dozens of increasingly complicated spreadsheets.

As one customer shared with us:

We have planning projects that have to evaluate thousands of residential on-street sites, with specific needs for our hardware and dwell times, and there is no way we could process this high volume with our home-brew kit of spreadsheets, Google Maps, and manual analysis. 

The secret, happy sauce?

The answer could lie in a secret, or at least a secret sauce. 

As we’ve shared on this blog before, successful CPOs create happy chargers (at scale) only once they move beyond spreadsheets and simple mapping tools in favor of a Charge Point Planning platform,  specifically Dodona Analytics, which some clients describe as their secret sauce for delivering happy chargers. 

Will you join us on our campaign?

If you agree that the world needs more happy chargers, then follow us as we dive into this topic on this blog, follow us on LinkedIn or get in touch, and we’ll show you how we do it.