ChargeMate AI Voice is live on 156 Electric Era DC fast charging ports — answering driver calls in seconds, resolving over 80% without human escalation, and turning every call into something the Operations team can actually use.
Even on the most reliable charging network, drivers still call. They call about payment holds, plug seating, what a screen prompt means, whether the issue is the car, the card, or the charger. These calls happen on healthy chargers, with sessions that are technically able to start. Hardware reliability doesn't make them go away.
The conventional response is to treat that residual volume as a help-desk problem — hire agents, write a script, measure handle time. But that volume is the most honest reliability signal in the network. A driver on hold at a working charger is a session at risk, and an unanswered question about why a healthy charging site is generating support calls in the first place.
Electric Era decided to operate Driver Support differently. As of March 2026, ChargeMate AI Voice went live across Electric Era’s DC fast charging network — answering inbound driver calls in seconds, resolving 80+% of issues that don't require human judgment, and routing escalations to Electric Era's team with full conversational context.
Getting there meant pulling live station data over OCPI and building a custom integration into their CPMS — down to error codes — so the agent could see what the charger was actually reporting in the moment. One month from kickoff to live in production.
Electric Era runs one of the most operationally disciplined DC fast charging networks in the U.S. — battery-buffered hardware and proprietary software with network uptime of 99.19% and first-attempt success rate of 90.6% year-to-date. Electric Era’s charging experience works very well.
But a network that charges EVs reliably still generates calls from drivers. Co-located with convenience stores, grocery and big box retailers, and fuel stops, Electric Era sites see real volume — and every call from a charger is a session at risk regardless of whether the hardware is healthy. A driver waiting on hold while their car sits at a working charger is a session that may not complete — and a visit that may not repeat.
Electric Era could have scaled Driver Support the conventional way: more human agents to handle a growing network. Instead, they chose to build an AI-first support layer with ChargeMate.
The fair question from any operator evaluating AI customer support: which calls does AI resolve, and which still come to my team?
For Electric Era, ChargeMate AI Voice handles the messy, real-world call types that account for the majority of inbound volume on a healthy network:
The system handles those calls the way a senior support agent would — staying focused on getting the session started, walking through practical next steps, recognizing the moment to escalate. It works in English / Spanish, in a windy parking lot with traffic noise, with drivers who interrupt and switch languages mid-call.
What it doesn't try to handle: anything requiring careful discretion, membership/loyalty account-level changes, complaints that need an empathetic human, or edge cases where the safest answer is "let me get someone on the line." Those route to Electric Era's team with the full conversation transcript and inferred problem state already in hand. No “What’s your issue?” restarts.
The visible value of AI support is the resolution rate. The durable value is knowing, in structured form, why a driver picked up the phone in the first place.
Every call is now a structured signal from the field — which charger screens confuse drivers, where app-based authentication fails, which EV make/models are having issues with Plug & Charge, and how different hardware SKUs perform. Many issues do not surface cleanly in OCPP logs or CPMS dashboards. Issues surface when a driver picks up the phone — and historically died in an agent's call notes.
ChargeMate captures every one of those driver conversations, extracts the failure mode, tags it to the site, charger, vehicle, and session, and feeds structured data back to Electric Era's Operations team as a continuous signal.
“Electric Era had a human call center, but it wasn't a consistent experience — some drivers waited, issues went unresolved, and the operation didn't scale. Electric Era made the decision to replace Tier 1 support entirely with AI. Now ChargeMate picks up on the first ring, speaks the driver's native language, and works through complex issues without hold times or handoffs. It runs 24/7/365 and becomes more valuable as Electric Era's network grows."
- Brad Crist, CEO & Co-founder, ChargeMate
"EV driver support requires a uniquely broad knowledge base. Our drivers need support from experts, not just on our own network and chargers, but on the entire EV ecosystem: which vehicles are compatible, how different batteries behave, charging speeds, and the quirks that come with someone driving their first EV or stepping out of a rental. ChargeMate's AI agent can hold all of that knowledge simultaneously and deliver real-time, personalized guidance tailored to the specific vehicle in front of the charger.
Beyond the driver experience, the operational advantages are significant. Updating a process or changing agent behavior doesn't require retraining an entire team. We can handle a higher call volume without scaling headcount. And we get far richer data from every interaction: call-level insights, support for new languages, and the ability to continuously improve. It's a system that gets smarter over time, and that's exactly what a fast-moving industry like EV charging demands."
- Hannah DeVault, Head of Operations & Maintenance, Electric Era
Every charging network identifies issues from Customer Support calls which don't show up in OCPP telemetry or CPMS dashboards. We'd like to walk through yours.
Tell us about your network and we'll share what we're seeing across other deployments.
