The end of customer support hotlines as you know it

Efficient and quick customer support is now easier than never

Our client, a large call center in Switzerland, experienced difficulties to attend their customers regarding complex products installation and issues. Customer service agents could take twice the average time needed to solve other usual cases and their first instructions were often unfruitful. The conventional voice-support channel reached its limits; hence our Client needed a creative solution that would help agents better understand customers' issues by visualizing it.

Remote support like on-site support

After discussions with the call center agents and all stakeholders of the support process, the idea to leverage Augmented-Reality (AR) technologies in order to offer an additional customer support channel within a same consultation was straightforward.
At OWT, we have a proven expertise in the support and maintenance domain and we successfully implemented our Smart Assistant solution in different industries (see also Empowering the Digitalization of the Gotthard Base Tunnel with Augmented Reality and Augmented Reality changes troubleshooting and maintenance of radio networks
).
The envisioned solution needed to be simple of use and quick to implement: In a single step, agents can send a video-session invitation to their customer via an SMS. The customer only needs to click on the received URL and a lightweight web application opens in his browser and allows him to share a video through his webcam.

Not to be confused with a simple video sharing platform, this application offers valuable functionalities like the possibility for agents to draw on the video to highlight products components and describe precisely the actions to be taken. This brings a noticeable increase in troubleshooting efficiency as both call participants share a common view of the situation. No solution approximation is made, agents can offer accurate and fact-based solutions.

Iterative journey

The aim of our mandate was to rapidly launch the call center agents' Smart Assistant and validate the business case of our Client. The project was defined by 3 steps following Open Web Technology's Methodology:

• A Blueprint to refine the target solution requirements and define all the surrounding dependencies
• A development phase using the Scrum framework to incrementally deliver the solution and discuss its evolution with our Client. We also helped organizing User Acceptance Testing after the final release of the product where a selected team experimented and validated the product.
• A production roll-out phase in which we organized training sessions for all the solution's users, and we gathered their feedback for future evolutions.