Remote visual assistance technology allows inspectors, auditors and customer service agents to resolve support and inspection issues faster and reduce field visits. It does so by allowing the agent to take over the camera of either a customer or colleague in the field and guide them through solving the issue with on-screen AR annotations.
As an innovator in the contact centre solution space for more than 15 years, we, at Hostcomm, saw the potential for this service, providing a solution now for nearly two years in the UK. In that time, built up a customer base with implementations across several industries including HomeServe, Peabody, Worthing Homes and Afast Aero, among others.
Introducing InspectAR; our new interface for Remote Inspections
We have developed a new centre for Remote Inspection and Audits that acts as a complete user interface for Remote Visual Assistance. From starting new sessions to customising and generating inspection reports, InspectAR has everything you need to complete thorough remote inspections from anywhere; plus InspectAR is mobile-friendly.
Powerful New Management Features
Based on feedback from those customers, and our own research, we have recently updated our tool with a new section called InspectAR which strongly bolsters the management and administration capabilities for businesses that have teams of Inspectors and Auditors. InspectAR enables them with more advanced tools to help customers and to get analytics and insight to help them improve their customer support processes and inevitably their levels of customer satisfaction and retention.
Media Browser with AI-Powered Search Recognition
Being able to thoroughly review and do analysis is a key to improving processes, and our media browser is designed to help do exactly that. In our Media Browser you can find all the media you captured during a session, including video, photos, and chat records with extracted data. There is the ability to filter per session, or via a phone number or AI-powered search recognition, or period of time. This can be very helpful for training because it can be used to identify successful cases where the problem was solved quickly, and to look at conversations, or the steps and styles used by the agent to annotate on the screen, which achieved that best-case result. Equally, if it went badly, and a call took a long time, or was unable to be resolved, identify ways to understand how the visual demonstration can be improved.
Amazon Rekognition
At the heart of our Media Browser is Amazon Rekognition technology, enabling powerful AI searches for details among images and video.
Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications using proven, highly scalable, deep learning. With Amazon Rekognition, you can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos relevant to your business, as well as detect any inappropriate content. For example, you can find your corporate logo on social media, identify your products on store shelves, or classify your machine parts in an assembly line.
In the case of remote visual assistance, our engineers have already trained and modelled through several 'Proof of Value' projects to help our customers across a range of industries, including consumer electronics, energy businesses, and housing associations, among many others. For example, you may want to search for ‘ethernet socket’ if you were focused on helping resolve a customer enquiry around their router. Or you may want to search for ‘loose wiring’ or ‘rust’ or a specific part that you suspect could be the cause of a problem. The ability to search in this way is highly beneficial in many situations. In time, organisations will inevitably build up a large database of photos from previous cases, which are an invaluable resource for problem-solving. However, if you only remember the issue, but not the name of the case, it makes it extremely difficult to find the relevant example, and a real-time opportunity to solve an issue the first time may be lost. In addition, being able to identify objects allows you to look for patterns of activity that can help with analytics.
Text Recognition
Another implementation inside our Media Browser is text recognition, which is extremely helpful when you want to extract key information from an image like a serial or model number. While an agent can potentially read and copy down text and numbers from a photo, it is cumbersome and fraught with the opportunity for human error. Using software that extracts the number makes it possible to automate this across all your photos and organise it in a database for analytics as well as having a record in the event of an issue. This can be especially useful if the problem wasn’t able to be solved inside that call and a part has to be ordered, making it a good idea to have a standardised and traceable way of communicating the number to others and having a record.
Field Teams
These powerful video and photo analytics tools are also extremely useful when there are inspection teams in the field and the office is working with them to solve a problem. The tools can also be used to monitor the performance of those field workers and ensure they have the right equipment with them by recognising PPE, hard hats and in fact tools, they may be planning to use.
Automated Alerts
It is also possible to set up automated alerts when certain things are recognised in pictures. For example, if a credit card or a face is seen you may want that deleted because of privacy issues.
Session Log
There is a session log that enables you to view all your sessions and organise them by date, session ID, phone number and session reference. You can download it as CSV or excel file or print it if you wish.
PDF Reports
If needed, it is possible to generate a pdf report based on the data from any session. The report is highly customisable with the ability to choose the media you wish to include and then just click to generate.
The report can be a great tool for establishing and sharing best practices or as an audit tool in the case of customer complaints and records of problem resolution. The report will include a map with GPS coordinates of the customer, which can be used for analytics purposes and to see the value of the truck rolls avoided by using remote visual assistance.
Report Designer
There is a report designer including sophisticated functionality to customise the size, font, header and footer text and add your company logo – in other words, add your company branding to a report so it is standardised and consistent with all your other internal documents.
Remote Visual Assistance
Want to learn more about remote inspections and our Remote Visual Assistance solution? Check out the solution page here for more information.
