Emergency Roadside Assistance Goes Fully Digital With Splunk

Agero knows what it means to be there for customers in a crisis.

As a market-leading white-label roadside assistance company working hand- in-hand with the majority of leading automakers and auto insurers, Agero provides critical driver support services 24/7 — from roadside assistance and connected vehicle services to accident scene management and beyond. The company responds to approximately 12 million events annually, supplying these services to many of the new vehicles sold in the United States and through two-thirds of U.S.-based auto insurance carriers, which cover over 100 million consumers.

Because motorists can seldom wait long in a vehicle breakdown situation, the ability to provide quick and accurate customer service is key. For many of the 50 years Agero had been in business, customers typically accessed its services via telephone, and from there, agents would rapidly dispatch a tow truck or other service provider.

As a software company, Agero had always relied on sophisticated tooling internally for its call center agents. But to make its services even better, Agero looked to make them more observable and offer a fully digital, transparent experience to better pinpoint locations, dispatch vehicles, and provide the help customers needed when they were in an accident or stranded on the road.

“Customers wanted to reach out to us through mobile apps provided by the insurance companies or the car manufacturers to get that assistance,” says Billy Macdonald, senior director of DevOps at Agero.

That’s where Splunk came in, Macdonald says. “In an industry where phone calls are the standard, Splunk’s observability solutions have helped us modernize to deliver a 100% digital, agentless experience to our drivers in need of roadside assistance.”

A single source of truth

As part of its digitization push, Agero initially implemented Splunk Observability Cloud for better monitoring and observability so it could troubleshoot and respond proactively to issues. But once the company started digitizing, the engineering and product teams increasingly relied on the Splunk solution because it gave them a flexible way to use unstructured data in any format. Agero needed to get all of its data points — living in multiple databases — into one place. Splunk allowed Agero to decentralize its engineering structure and microservices into one provider, which offered a single source of truth for the entirety of the company’s data and made it easier to track.

Splunk Cloud has also been crucial for Agero’s DevOps infrastructure pipeline, offering a flexible platform to monitor and track data across SRE, engineering, product and business teams without any bottleneck issues. “By leveraging Splunk’s observability capabilities across our cloud environment and infrastructure, our site reliability engineers and developers gain end-to-end visibility to monitor, track and troubleshoot issues before they impact our customers, ultimately delivering a better customer experience,” says Macdonald.