EVA Global: Cure or Remedy?
Sad news today: EVA Global filed for bankruptcy.
As most of you will know, I was the first CTO of EVA Global. Seeing this news makes me sad. The risk of my old amazing colleagues losing their jobs.
I hope management can restructure the organization: focus on the core business: The contact center, and come out on top more resilient. The industry needs a company like EV Global to provide good service to its customers.
Donald Hopper and Niina Suuriniemi Hopper had a brilliant idea when they started EVA. They had found a niche that nobody else was looking into. The EV Charging industry was in desperate need of a multi-language contact center with good knowledge of the industry. Especially in Europe, with many different languages, it is impossible for any CPO or MSP to support all the different languages 24/7 on your own.
EVA grew quickly during the COVID pandemic, providing jobs to people in the Malaga area who used to work in the tourism industry that was now completely down.
I have seen firsthand what the pressure of VCs can do to a company. VCs will try to make a company as valuable as possible. Too bad that in this case, they tried to force EVA to start doing more and more different services: spreading EVA senior staff too thin, not enough focus on the core business.
Does the EV charging industry need a contact center? My view? Yes and No: EVA is the remedy. The cure is reliable charging infrastructure. For me, this was the reason to join PIONIX GmbH. The LF Energy EVerest Project initiated by PIONIX is the best approach to reliable charging infrastructure so far. On top of this, it reduces the cost of developing software for charging stations: Win-win!
For now, a multi-language contact center is still needed. Using modern AI and LLMs should reduce the cost of calls by handling the simplest requests by AI first. I'm just not convinced AI can solve 100% of the calls and a company should switch from AI to a real person as soon as possible.
