Support of things

There has been a lot of talk about how the IoT will revolutionise the world. Some say it will fundamentally change the way people interact with the world around them, others say it will generate trillions in economic value, but many have lost sight of its true potential.

Significantly for field service teams, connectivity opens doors for direct access to customer feedback that has until now been possible only through third parties such as retailers. With consumers becoming ever more connected, these contact points will only continue to expand. The challenges currently facing businesses in customer engagement and support are only the tip of the iceberg.

The problem is that the Internet of Things (IoT) is still a fairly abstract concept to many — connecting seemingly ‘dumb’ things to enable the sharing of data. From a business perspective, what does it really mean? As we see it, the value of the IoT in the ‘here and now’ is as an equally connected and pre-emptive customer support structure that meets the needs of today’s ever more connected customer — we call it ‘The Support of Things’.

When we developed LogMeIn Rescue, it was in response to a transformation of the workforce that altered end-user expectations and business needs. As end users increasingly demand a quick resolution to service issues and businesses strive to keep their support costs down, our cloud-based remote IT support solution enables instant deployment of a technician, providing a simple way to look at a user’s screen or evaluate a device’s diagnostics.

The next logical step was to develop visual inspection capability, and we see this as vital to any business that offers reactive support. As any support technician knows, sometimes a customer problem can be as simple as a loose connection, an unplugged device, a jammed printer or a missing piece of wiring.

Problems like this are obvious after the fact, but can be surprisingly easy to overlook initially. The Rescue Lens feature offers instant visibility and means that irksome issues can be resolved without unnecessary technician deployment.

Truck-rolls are expensive and techs aren’t always guaranteed to have the right part onboard, so visual verification of the problem prior to any further action is a valuable tool for any service business.

Rescue Lens allows end users to use smartphone or tablet cameras to stream live video back to the support technician, quickly and easily. It’s a simple matter of downloading an app (Android or iOS), entering a PIN code to ensure security, then streaming the video back.

Australia’s relative geographic isolation from the United States and Europe has created a market of early adopters — we are keen to look at how technology can be pushed further and how it can be used in alternative ways. We find that our customers are building use-cases on a daily basis, as they determine new ways to both implement Rescue Lens for productivity and service-level improvements and to make use of the IoT in general.

Fuji Xerox is a longstanding LogMeIn customer and is commencing a pilot of the Rescue Lens feature. The company supports customers across 14 countries in the Asia–Pacific region and, as with many service enterprises, historically worked under a break/fix methodology. Implementing visual inspection capability is expected to deliver improvement in two ways: 1) expensive truck-rolls are minimised — the cost benefit here is obvious; and 2) as a value-add to resourcing.

The second is a less expected advantage and a clear example of customers building their own use-case. Having that visual capability means that companies can send junior or less experienced field technicians out to site with more confidence. Senior techs can remain in the back office and offer remote support. If the on-site tech is working on a new piece of equipment or struggling to find the fault, the live-video stream provides a valuable tool to assist with diagnostics and to resolve issues quickly. To that end, it also serves as a cost-effective and important means of providing staff training.

Major telcos including Telstra and Optus see the inherent value and are now looking at how to incorporate this functionality to further their own service offering. Every business has the same goal — to make the customer happy — so anything that reduces support expense and facilitates a faster customer resolve represents a great opportunity for field service businesses.

The IoT will change the face of field service as we move further from a reactive approach to proactive service scheduling and maintenance. At this stage, many companies still struggle to see the inherent opportunity and to understand how benefit will be derived, because the break/fix model is so prevalent still. Think about how much easier a pay TV technician’s life would be if he could see how the customer had connected their set-top device without having to physically go to the premises.

We partnered with SATO to help deliver the world’s first IoT label printer. While printers are theoretically already ‘connected’, SATO wanted much more than the ability to send print jobs. Using our Xively solution, SATO was given hundreds of functions to track and monitor — in real time — printer usage, error incidents, paper and ink supply levels and whether additional accessories were enabled.

Xively utilised Heroku and salesforce.com to build both customer-facing and SATO-facing apps that give users the power to remotely control and monitor each printer, and then store that data in Salesforce. A SATO service rep could, for example, change any of 300 settings on a printer like the darkness of the print or the language settings. The Salesforce integration also allows for automated triggering of issues before the customer knows about them. For example, customers can set up notifications to let them know when they are running low on ribbon or labels. There are benefits across the board:

• 24-hour/365-day monitoring of printers to identify problems before they occur.
• Improved operating rates and efficiencies including elimination of unplanned downtime for SATO customers through analysis of logged data.
• Reduced SATO service costs by understanding printer issues before sending in service technicians.
• Overall Xively helped SATO achieve its goal of creating a truly interactive product that allows for always-on customer service with an automated feedback loop that improves service across the board.
• Increased customer satisfaction with user-configurable alerts for things like low ribbon or other common errors.

We are at the beginning of exciting times in terms of being able to improve customer satisfaction, attraction and retention. Companies that will benefit most will be those that recognise these potential opportunities and develop new ways to utilise technology to further their own offering.