Not happy with your car? Just talk to it
By: Lily Pislar
Tags: Mobility, Startup, Data, Transportation, Automotive

Sitting in the backseat of a cab in Paris, Daniel started chatting with his driver, Jean, who had recently bought a fantastic car, beautiful and comfortable. However, that car had one irritating thing: you could not properly fix the phone to the cockpit, and this was particularly annoying as Jean would often need to do this for navigation purposes. Eventually, because of that and other things, Jean sold his car. What’s worse, the carmaker would never have heard about this case and keep on producing vehicles with the same flaw.

How many times have you thought about how companies can improve some products we use in our everyday life? A lot, probably.

But how many times have we actually taken the time to pick up the phone or fill in an online form to report the faults of these products? Much less, correct?

User experience is a crucial aspect of the strategy of a company in order to have loyal customers. Can a company build a sustainable business if their clients only use their services once? Basing ourselves on the aforementioned example, carmakers in particular need to focus on their feedback management processes. And indeed, it can result in being a long and tedious one: collecting the information in various channels (social media, customer satisfaction forms, etc.), classifying it (customer service, vehicle performance, etc.), analysing it, before finally implementing concrete actions.

How could automotive companies analyse customers’ feedback in one click?

After that taxi trip in Paris and based on his conversation with Jean, Daniel Ritter decided to dedicate himself to build a simple process to collect and analyse the feedback of all the Jeans. This way, the Product teams of every automotive company would be able to know exactly not only what gets on the nerves of their customers while using their vehicles but also what makes them fall in love with them. In short, this is how the concept of Better World came to life.

Better World is a French startup that offers an end-to-end feedback management solution, specifically dedicated to the automotive sector. The feedback is collected from data sources adapted to the industry, including a leading-edge in-car vocal feedback data source.

So how does it specifically work?

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms are tailored to the automotive-related language. As a result, Better World’s solution is able to detect automotive products and services with accuracy (e.g. the precise generation of a given car), allowing competitive benchmarking.

The main use-cases are focused on:

Product development: allowing to define the specifications of new products.

On manufacturing: improving the efficiency of factories and leveraging the insights of operators.

On service: adjusting it to the customers’ expectations.

On quality, detecting and launching corrective actions earlier and faster.

Better World works with major European and Japanese carmakers and helps them to monitor customer satisfaction in early phases after launch, to prepare mid-life reviews, and to detect quality incidents very early to reduce warranty and recall costs.

The startup developed a wide-leading automotive vocal feedback analytics system being part of the IMPACT Connected Car acceleration program, an initiative that was supporting innovative startups and SMEs in the automotive industry. Last year, during the IMPACT Connected Car Pioneer Award, Better World was awarded as the best European startup in the automotive sector!

“I have had a really great experience with IMPACT Connected Car, especially when considering the coaching from renowned automotive experts that allowed us to be even more focused on our offer. Also, the programme gave us visibility, which helped us in our commercial development. What’s more, you receive funding and the ability to network with other connected car companies.” — said Daniel Ritter, CEO of Better World.

How did Better World overcome recent changes and challenges?

The current global pandemic-situation affected all sectors, and the automotive one was no exception. The Better World team needed to have a fully remote working environment during the peak of Covid-19 in France which happened to work very well for them. Also, they took advantage of the activity decrease to re-allocate some time to the development of a new version of their product.

The company made a strong development in the medical sector. Better World decided to build a scalable model for other industries, especially healthcare: the purpose is to analyse patients’ feedback with respect to their in-hospital experience!

Aligning the working approaches with corporate partners and clients has been one important challenge the start-up has been facing.

“A first challenge was the speed of decision-making. We overcame this challenge by proposing risk-free offers, with “pilot” periods with no commitment. The second challenge was the fear of competition between internal data science teams and start-up teams. We overcame this challenge by building a clear collaborative way of working building on mutual strengths.”

What can we expect from the automotive industry in the coming years?

“The automotive sector is undergoing massive changes, especially towards more electrification, more autonomy, more sharing and more connectivity. This implies that carmakers urgently need to define where they want to go, in that fast-changing context. We believe that it is critical to leverage the input of users in that process, which is precisely what Better World is enabling.”

According to Daniel, his conviction is that the future of automotive customer feedback collection will be vocal and inside cars, and will not be lengthy paper surveys that are filled out at home. Imagine your car asking for your feedback (if you agreed to it upfront) while you are stuck in a traffic jam. Daniel believes this prefigures the future of automotive market research.