A major OEM heavily involved in the commercial vehicle market needed a detailed understanding of how individual drivers and fleets used its trucks to inform future commercial vehicle designs and product positioning. The OEM had limited knowledge of day-to-day product use so understanding unique drivers and fleets was no small undertaking. It needed a combination of large-scale, quantitative data and smaller-sample, more personalized insights to provide context. And, it needed ongoing insights over a long period of time.
Escalent engaged companies with a mixture of vehicle classes—and individuals within these organizations—to participate in a two-year-long Insight Community to establish ongoing dialogue. Then we applied our DataDialogue™ suite of solutions to gather telematics data for each vehicle on a continual basis. We sent power train and related big data to the OEM’s engineers while routing utilization and location data to the Escalent team for analysis and recommendations. Our Insight Community surveys and activities kept community members engaged, which provided context and depth to the telematics data findings.
Our client got a real-world understanding of how drivers and fleets were using its trucks. It implemented a set of internal procedures to use the engineering telematics data and study recommendations to support its short-term plan (fix problems) and long-term plan (develop new products). Ultimately, it integrated the findings into its next generation of trucks, significantly decreasing the length of its product development cycle. It also experienced a very positive lift from social media: Insight Community members posted uplifting messages expressing how participating in the research made them feel valued and how satisfying it was to contribute to the production of better designed, smarter trucks.