Now is the time to upgrade your remote repair capabilities
To maintain business continuity in the face of the current crisis, service centers must inevitably reconfigure their operations. As they adapt to ‘work from home’ and ‘social distancing’ mandates, now is the time for service centers to implement remote repair capabilities in order to enhance safety and resilience.
By Andy Chinmulgund
How service organizations interact with their customers in the field has changed overnight. Everything from packaging, to warehousing and logistics, to shipment and installation is being reworked to minimize safety risks while maintaining efficiency. To reduce the safety risk for field-based technicians and customers, service centers that manage technical support of field-serviced appliances should upgrade their systems to minimize the need for onsite diagnosis and repair visits.
Start by re-evaluating your current capabilities and assess where technology can accelerate your transition to remote repair. For highly technical or commercial products, you’ll want to initially focus on guided assistance for contact center agents and tech support, whereas for less complex machines such as home appliances it may make more sense to implement customer self-service capabilities on the support website.
Data is the next consideration. Many service centers have access to the key data needed to spin up remote machine diagnostics and repair. The challenge is putting it to work. The typical phases here are orchestrating that data, analyzing it, and then applying machine learning to infer accurate diagnostic and remedial action to get faulty equipment up and running.
Which information is needed? This phase involves combining machine-specific information with service records, audio records of service calls, notes from successful problem resolution, technical/service manuals, and specific observations from the current call center or self-help session. Armed with this data, we can apply machine-learning technologies to quickly and accurately diagnose the cause of the problem for that unit and define appropriate corrective action.
Machine-specific repair or fix recommendations can provide intelligent guidance within a contact center agent’s dashboard so that both contact center and service teams can provide effective remedies for technical issues reported by a customer. For customer self-service, calls can be deflected from the contact center by integrating intelligent self-service functionality into the main website or social media platforms.
This same technology will reduce the frequency of truck rolls and site visits. This means service groups can focus the skills of the experienced field technicians on mission-critical cases by accurately diagnosing which problems require a site visit is warranted. If a truck must be rolled, the system can maximize first-time problem resolution by automatically provisioning the service truck with the right part for the job. Again, it all comes down to minimizing human-to-human interaction while maintaining high customer satisfaction.
Bruviti’s service automation technology provides the foundation
We can help you every step of the way. By applying our data analytics and machine learning technology to your frontline contact center and service systems, Bruviti helps your customer contact agents resolve complex issues faster. Powered by AI, Bruviti Virtual Assistant combines essential and contextually relevant information into a single window that centralizes all an agent needs to solve a customer’s issue. The dashboard can be configured to include a wide array of equipment and customer information, chat session history, knowledge base and technical data, parts inventory, and more.
2020 will be a transformational year in many ways. If you need help defining and implementing your COVID-19 response plan, Bruviti is here to help. Contact us here to set up a call with our experts.