Utilization of data collected with a remote support solution in business development

Softability’s Mikko Luukkonen was speaking at the Data Business Forum 2020 virtual event held last December on how data collected with a remote support solution can be utilized in business development. In his presentation, Luukkonen gave, among other things, examples of use cases where automatic data collection is useful, and how artificial intelligence can be utilized to support a remote support solution.

 

Automatic data collection of service requests enables many use cases

The XReach remote support solution developed by Softability is a real-time live video-based support tool between a technician and an expert. XReach enables automatic and easy collection of data from the service requests stored securely in the cloud; no data is stored on the devices. Over time this process forms a knowledge bank that speeds up solving of problems without the need to necessarily call an expert. If the problem is the same or similar to an existing one stored in the knowledge bank, the technician can use the found solution data in the knowledge bank to solve the issue.

The data collected can be used, for example, to identify where technicians or experts have the most information gaps. Based on this, it is possible to focus training investments on the issues that technicians and experts face the most challenges with.

The collected data also enables faster onboarding of new employees. Using the knowledge bank, it is convenient to show cases that have already been solved and teach new employees how to solve problems in the best possible way.

The collected data must be analyzed and reported so it can be utilized in business development. Based on the insights generated by the analysis, companies form an idea of which of their machines or services have the most problems, what are the issues specifically and how, by whom and in which time they have been solved. Armed with this knowledge, a company can develop its business, for example, by designing more sustainable and easier-to-maintain products or more efficient services.

Sandvik Mining & Rock Technology has found similar results after implementing the XReach remote support solution:

“We have a global solution that catalogs all of the maintenance data, compiles it and puts it in a place where the rest of the experts have access to it at any point. Based on the knowledge bank we can identify the caps in our maintenance knowledge and how to develop our competence in those. Based on the data we can understand better how machines work in the field and thus increase machine uptime and maintenance productivity. By analyzing the data we can design and manufacture more durable and easier-to-maintain machines, and thus serve our customers better.”, says Lindsay Jackson, Service Operations Inspections Specialist, Sandvik Mining & Rock Solutions.

 

Artificial intelligence-based services support remote support solution

Today, large technology companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and many others, provide versatile, easy-to-deploy artificial intelligence-based services to support and enhance application solutions. When talking about a remote support solution, artificial intelligence adds value to the solution, for example in image recognition and language translations.

Image recognition can be utilized in remote support, for example, to identify a broken machine or an individual part of it. There are various actors in the world for this, such as Partium.
The maintenance process is faster when the technician does not have to spend time manually searching for information about the machine or its part and finding the correct replacement part. The service can even be integrated into a maintenance system that automatically orders a new part after the broken machine or its part has been identified.

Artificial intelligence also brings significant benefits to speech recognition, enabling almost real-time language translation. For example, when using a remote support solution globally, a technician and an expert may be completely on different sides of the globe and a common language may not always be found or they speak different country- or region-specific dialects of the same language. The function of artificial intelligence is to recognize speech and convert it into the desired language. In this way, communication between people who speak different languages is altogether possible or simply of better quality. Please find more information for example on Microsoft’s language translation services.

The remote support solution brings clear business benefits when the use cases are carefully defined. We develop the XReach ready-made solution individually according to the customer’s needs and the solution can be integrated into the customer’s existing systems. With the solution, we help to develop your company’s business.

 

DFB 2020 studio interview can be viewed in Finnish from the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLsB1txBhzQ

For more information:

Mikko Luukkonen, Solution Sales, Softability Oy, +358 50 554 3652, mikko.luukkonen(at)softability.fi

Keywords:

artificial intelligence business development data DBF2020 etätukiratkaisu remote support solution XReach