Help Lightning in the News

The findings from SFG℠’s 2020 Remote Expertise Benchmark Survey clearly reflect a strong level of receptivity and acceptance of Remote Expertise. More than three-quarters of respondents (80%) indicate that they believe Remote Expertise represents, or will represent, a fundamental shift in the way they deliver service and support to their customers. Even better, their respective confidence levels are fairly high with respect to those believing that their current (and planned) technology investments are sufficient to support Remote Expertise (61%); and that their business, headcount and service apparatus can support Remote Expertise (65%).

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Augmented Reality has been applied to Remote Expertise to allow subject matter experts to project their knowledge and skill to a remote colleague or customer requiring assistance. The technology merges the two live video streams into a single environment. This allows the expert to be virtually present and interact in real-time to help resolve a problem.

The simplicity of remote expertise makes it incredibly powerful for problem-solving. Why has Remote Expertise been so successful in producing value for service organizations?

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For our 4 picks of AR knowledge supplementation startups, we used a data-driven startup scouting approach to identify the most relevant solutions globally. The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 4 interesting examples out of 130 relevant solutions. Depending on your specific needs, your top picks might look entirely different.

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Surprisingly, nearly 80% of car seats on the road today are installed incorrectly. UAB Youth Safety Lab is working in collaboration with Safe Kids International to help improve these statistics. They are using Help Lightning's Merged Reality to connect parents in remote locations with car seat installation experts. The results are impressive.

Watch the video here

Many of Help Lightning’s customers manufacture relatively complex pieces of equipment. To support these kinds of users, companies typically offer an 800 number that connects to a call center. If an issue can’t be resolved over a phone call, then a field service technician must be dispatched to help. However, that process can be extremely time-, cost- and labor-intensive for the manufacturer and end up offering a poor experience to their customers. Therefore it is imperative to fix the problem as quickly and effectively as possible. Using Help Lightning has proven extremely beneficial to such companies.

Read Full Story at Nexmo

Comparing the present-day states of the consumer and enterprise sectors of augmented reality is like evaluating the merits of sports car versus work trucks. Like consumer AR, sports cars are sexy and exciting, but perhaps a bit impractical at times. On the other hand, enterprise AR is utilitarian, but it gets the job done and, in the long run, pays for itself.

Read Full Story at Next Reality

Over the past 24 months, I have worked with over 50 service organizations to help them address adoption. What has become clear to me is that Merged Reality is no longer a technology play. Rather, Merged Reality is much more about change management and behavior change than it is about technology. It requires organizations to change the mindsets of service professionals. To change service processes. It means getting out of a comfort zone and committing to deliver service in a new way. And the reality is that none of these changes are easy.

Read Full Story at Future of Field Service

Companies are already deploying AR for service applications to improve resolution rates and address the looming technician shortage.
Augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) have made tremendous strides over the past Afew years. Goldman Sachs has forecast that the market for these technologies will reach $80 billion by 2025, and they generally rank near the top of most analysts’ hot technology lists.

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Three weeks after Forbes published a deep-dive about the Magic City’s strides to become a tech hub, entitled “Inside Birmingham’s Bid To Become The Southern Silicon Valley,” Barron’s hailed the city in an article with the title “Add Birmingham To Tech’s Growing List of Hubs.” Help Lightning, a virtual reality tool for customer-service agents to install or fix equipment, earned Barron's mention as a successful startup headquartered at Innovation Depot, Birmingham's tech startup hub.

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When you call the cable company to troubleshoot an issue, you’re often walked through steps that are easy to misunderstand, leaving you and the technician on the phone frustrated. Part of that may be the method of delivery, as studies in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior show that adding gestures and non-verbal cues substantially improves speed of understanding. Hypepotamus interviews Gary York, CEO of Help Lightning, to explain how a mixed reality mobile platform, can help.

Read Full Story at Hypepotamus