Reimagining the way your organization does troubleshooting
Can you maintain a growing in- stall-base and meet customer expectations by using existing resources more efficiently?
Elena Grabmeier and Florian Haeger at Siemens Healthineers certainly thought so.
With an innovative portfolio of medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, advanced therapies, and service solutions for healthcare providers, Siemens Healthineers was looking for a better way for service experts to collaborate with field agents— without making a costly investment in new equipment.
The two began looking for a solution that was easy to use and worked on mobile end-user devices. It also needed to be intuitive, convenient, and well established in the market be- cause thousands of field service experts would need to adopt whatever solution they chose to invest in. They found their answer in Help Lightning’s remote expertise solution. By giving experts and agents the ability to blend two real-time video streams into an interactive environment—using devices they already had—they’d gain the capability of working in tandem, even when they were continents apart.
The Advantages of a Virtual Interactive Presence
Remote expertise with Merged Reality—the merging of two real-time video streams—allows experts to virtually work
side-by-side with colleagues and customers to solve problems more efficiently and with fewer costs.
These interactive help sessions facilitate fast response times and quick problem resolution, dramatically improving customer satisfaction across industries. Remote experts can instantly diagnose, solve and validate customer care issues even from thousands of miles away. Simply put, experts can be hands-on even when they’re not on site.
Using interactive video, an expert can show rather than tell customers or technicians how to solve a problem. Likewise,
the technician or customer can use their hands and gestures to point to specific problem areas, better illustrating what they want to share with the expert.
This is not only more efficient but builds trust and confidence. And for global organizations, it removes language barriers that often impact international collaboration, helping to avoid misunderstandings.
STUDIES SHOW adding gestures and nonverbal cues substantially improves the speed of understanding, resulting in an enhanced customer experience. Source: Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
Why Choose a Remote Expertise Solution for Your Service Organization?
Whether someone is drawing on the screen (Telestrating), freezing images, using hand gestures to demonstrate a spe- cific change, or even adding real objects into the video envi- ronment, remote expertise improves understanding, shortens help times, and enhances customer experiences. Customers, service experts, and technicians can say goodbye to frustrat- ing phone calls, web searches, or unfocused video chats.
Connect experts around the globe
Technicians no longer need an expert to accompany them to job sites. Instead, remote expertise lets them tap into any expert’s knowledge from anywhere in the world, all through a simple shared link. Similarly, customers can directly connect for help.
Enable faster repair times
Being able to visually interact with technicians from a field office anywhere in the world helps service experts resolve problems as though they were working side-by-side with a colleague or a customer.
This virtual hands-on assistance means technical knowledge is conveyed faster and problems are solved sooner.
Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
Language barriers, frustrating descriptions, lack of visual guides, and simple misunderstandings can frustrate trouble-
shooting efforts and problem- solving calls. But remote ex- pertise removes some of these barriers by improving commu- nication, which, in turn, improves customer satisfaction, and ultimately, boosts customer loyalty.
Create a new competitive advantage
While other companies are sending service agents to job sites with lots of parts and no context of the problems they’ll encounter, remote expertise let’s you diagnose problems from
a remote office. And when a service agent is required to be on- site, they’re dispatched with the correct parts and a previously established context of the problem, improving efficiency and giving you an advantage others don’t have.
Minimize costs and waste
If time is money, then wasted service trips are costing you a fortune. Remote expertise not only saves wasted service agent time by cutting down on multiple trips but it reduces
costs by improving your first time fix rate. It also means you can order the parts you need rather than stockpiling everything you might need.
Rolling Out Remote Expertise to 2000+ Agents
If you’re considering remote expertise in your service organization, Siemens Healthneers’ rollout of Help Lighting serves as a good model of what to look for and how to roll it out to your agents.
While Siemens Healthineers is a global organization with vast resources, they chose to start small, focusing on internal use cases and regular exchanges with task force teams.
While implementing a top-down strategy, they also created a bottom-up approach that allowed teams to set their own pace and develop a personalized approach to implementation.
With assistance from Help Lightning implementation experts, teams had the flexibility and freedom to implement Help Lightning in ways that met their specific needs and requirements.
Getting Everyone On Board
Siemens Healthineers recommends involving your customers and business partners in the entire rollout process, while establishing local task force teams and regional ambassadors. This approach worked well for them. Implementation at a global level—while giving local control—lets everyone do what they’re best at, reducing bottlenecks, diminishing interdependencies, and avoiding duplicate work.
During the rollout, Help Lighting was able to provide representatives to assist Siemens headquarters operations, as well as assistance to various task force teams on a project-level basis. Doing so helped individual teams calculate savings and provide updated training materials on a regular basis.
To satisfy the high expectations of everyone involved, Siemens Healthineers’ leaders frequently reminded everyone involved in the rollout of the advantages they would gain by implementing
a remote expertise solution like Help Lightning. To put people at ease, they focused on knowledge sharing, efficiency, and overcoming language barriers as benefits, making the entire organization more responsive to customer needs.
A key talking point has been the fact that no one would need to carry equipment other than their phone. They also made clear that implementation was about improving the customer experience, not about making senior employees obsolete (a common concern with any new digital initiative).
Siemens Healthineers has successfully rolled out Help Lightning’s remote expertise solution to more than 2000 agents in 25 countries. From signing the first contract to the final
handoff to their service operations teams, the rollout has taken just ten months.
Benefits of Remote Expertise
Provide in-depth diagnoses to reduce multiple trips to the site or the ordering of unneeded parts.
- Have a dramatic impact on first-time fix rates, reduce onsite visits.
- Let your customers get in touch with you directly, without waiting for onsite help.
- Overcome technical and foreign language barriers by providing hands-on guidance.
- Reduce downtime with faster problem solving.
With Help Lightning, we have completely reimagined how businesses, customers and employees are able to give and receive help using merged reality. We’ve eliminated the frustrations and inadequacies of phone or simple video chat, as well as dramatically reduced the need to drive or fly to interact in person. For more information, please visit helplightning.com.
