ACKO already had roadside assistance. Almost nobody knew it existed. I had to fix that, and rebuild how the whole service worked, from the first tap to the moment help actually arrived.
I led the design of ACKO's first digital roadside assistance product, built from scratch. Before this, the entire service ran through phone calls. At launch, the new product handled 2,188 cases without a single phone call and cut resolution time in half.
This meant working across three connected systems at once. I designed the customer app from scratch. I extended the crew's existing Service OS with new scenarios built for this project. And I worked within the existing agent portal to understand and shape how a request gets assigned and handed off, since the experience is only as strong as its weakest part.
Roadside assistance (RSA) was already live, but barely. Customers called a number, waited on hold, repeated their story to three different agents, and still had no idea when help was coming. Expensive, slow, and invisible to the customers who needed it most.
Survey of ~500 policyholders + 6,604 call records · Jan to May 2025
Less than 1% of customers were using a service that 14.1% of them needed. That gap had nothing to do with the app. People didn't know roadside assistance existed, and the ones who did didn't trust it would work.
Roadside assistance wasn't just an app problem. It was a service design problem, with broken operations, multiple stakeholders, and users in genuine distress. The process reflected that reality.
Every decision came down to the same tension: what operations needed to run efficiently versus what a stressed user could actually do in the moment.
Phase 1 for roadside assistance add-on policyholders. Phase 2 extended to all policyholders with own damage cover. Phase 3 opens to non-policyholders as a standalone paid service.
Service OS is the internal tool the ground crew used to manage each case.
Three systems had to work together for this to function. I designed the customer app, extended the existing Service OS with scenarios specific to this project, and worked within the existing agent portal to shape how assignment and handoff actually worked.
This tool already existed and was used for other scenarios before this project. My work here was designing how it specifically handled RSA cases, the crew's view of an assigned case, what they see, accept, and update as they work through it.
A request starts the same way everywhere, through the app, with probing done either in app or by an in house agent on a call. What happens next depends entirely on location.
In the top 8 cities, and only there, the case goes to an in house crew member through the crew management tool. They accept, travel, assess in person, resolve directly, and can offer custody service. The customer sees live tracking the whole way, since everything is in house. Standalone paid RSA, not tied to an ACKO policy, is only available here too.
Beyond the top 8 cities, only ACKO own damage policyholders can access RSA. There's no in house crew, fulfillment goes to an external partner network with no dedicated setup for us, and assignment alone takes 15 to 20 minutes. An agent manually updates status based on what the partner reports, so the app only reflects it once that happens. Live tracking works for about 40% of these cases, depending on the partner's own tech. The same manual path applies if a top 8 city drop location is beyond 100 kilometers.
The drop in support calls matters most. It means customers found what they needed without having to ask anyone. That's what the product was supposed to do.
