For a company known across 126 countries for its commitment to world-class service, Peak Scientific’s success has always rested on the shoulders of its people—specifically, the field service engineers (FSEs) who support laboratory operations for critical life science and manufacturing applications.
But as long-tenured experts approached retirement, the company was forced to confront a new operational challenge: how do you preserve what made you great before it disappears?
“We’ve invested heavily in training,” said Mike Hughes, Peak’s Global Head of Service. “But onboarding alone doesn’t capture the years of experience, nuance, and instinct that our experts bring. That’s what we risk losing.”
Peak Scientific had already embraced SightCall’s Remote Visual Support to great effect, boasting a 99% first-time fix rate. But when offered early access to a new innovation—Xpert Knowledge™—they saw an opportunity to go one step further: to transform live problem-solving into long-term learning.
The Challenge: Rapid Growth Meets Impending Attrition
Since its founding in 1997, Peak Scientific has experienced remarkable growth. In just the past six years, the company doubled its FSE headcount. While this growth is a testament to the company’s strength, it also introduced two critical hurdles:
An aging workforce: “We have many engineers with 10-plus years of experience,” Hughes explained. “But those experienced engineers also have to retire, don’t they?”
Time pressures on onboarding and support: As Peak scaled, time-intensive onboarding and repetitive Tier 1 support cases began to strain teams. “We needed a way to reduce repeat work and preserve knowledge at the same time,” Hughes said.
The Solution: Scaling Wisdom with Xpert Knowledge
Xpert Knowledge™—developed by SightCall—offers a transformative solution. Rather than relying on manuals or static documents, the tool automatically captures and condenses visual support sessions into curated, multimedia tutorials. These tutorials are instantly usable across training, support, and engineering teams.
“We were already solving problems visually,” Hughes noted. “Xpert Knowledge™ takes that same interaction and turns it into training material. It’s a force multiplier.”
Implementation was straightforward, thanks to SightCall’s existing Zendesk integration. Hughes praised the seamlessness: “We’re not adding new tools. We’re adding intelligence. Every call becomes data. Every tutorial becomes a resource.”
The Impact: From Call Resolution to Continuous Learning
With the introduction of Xpert Knowledge™, Peak Scientific moved beyond the traditional model of reactive support, evolving into an organization driven by proactive knowledge creation. This shift has delivered tangible benefits across the business.
Onboarding time for new technicians has dropped significantly, as new hires can now learn directly from real-world support scenarios. Instead of relying on shadowing or repeated walkthroughs from senior staff, they gain immediate access to practical, visual guidance—accelerating their ramp-up and reducing the burden on veteran engineers.
The speed of resolving common issues has also improved. As Mike Hughes explained, what previously required a 30-minute live support call can now be addressed through a two-minute tutorial. These guides are not only efficient, but highly reusable across different teams and regions, making them a scalable solution to recurring problems.
Perhaps most importantly, Xpert Knowledge™ ensures that critical expertise doesn’t vanish when experienced engineers retire. Instead, their know-how is captured and transformed into tutorials that continue to educate the next generation. This tribal knowledge is now preserved and shared as a lasting asset.
These videos are also being used in ways the team didn’t expect. Product and engineering teams are using them to better understand what really happens out in the field, which helps them design better tools and equipment.
The training team has also started using the tutorials in their lessons, making it easier for new hires to learn and helping improve the way the whole company works.
As Hughes put it, “We can now relay back to engineering what’s really happening in the field,” a capability that’s proving invaluable.
Laying the Groundwork for AI-Driven Service
While Xpert Knowledge™ is already making a meaningful impact on Peak Scientific’s daily operations, Mike Hughes sees it as just the beginning.
As the company begins to explore how artificial intelligence can support and enhance service delivery, the value of the content being generated through Xpert Knowledge™ is becoming even clearer.
Each video tutorial created from a real-world service interaction isn’t just a training tool—it’s a data point, a learning asset that can be fed into future AI systems to improve predictions, automate responses, and refine best practices.
“Every curated tutorial becomes something an AI system can learn from,” Hughes explained. “We didn’t realize this at first, but we now see this as foundational to our AI strategy.”
This shift in thinking is helping Peak prepare for a future where AI plays a much bigger role—not as a replacement for human expertise, but as a way to make that expertise more accessible, more consistent, and more powerful across the organization.
Leading Service Through Innovation
“This is how we maintain our service leadership,” Hughes said. “Not just by solving problems, but by turning every solution into something we can reuse, learn from, and build on.”
That philosophy—of capturing what works and scaling it—is what positions Peak not just as a high-performing service organization, but as an industry leader.
In a time when field service teams everywhere are grappling with workforce turnover, rising customer expectations, and increasing technical complexity, Peak Scientific shows what’s possible when innovation is driven by a clear purpose.
Their story isn’t just about adopting a new tool. It’s about using that tool to build something bigger: a smarter, more resilient, and more future-ready service operation.
