A European leader in user experience, with 17 contact center locations and over 200 clients, HELPLINE provides companies with user assistance and support services from its contact center, to facilitate the use of digital technology by all employees. HELPLINE’S customers include the French franchises of one of the world’s largest Food & Beverage corporations, for whom it has SLAs to respond to 95% of IT problems within 60 seconds. The designated employee of each franchise working with HELPLINE expects to connect with a human agent who can think, communicate, react, and adapt in a way AI—on its own—cannot. And the need is great.
For these franchises, every second of device downtime leads to missed sales and customer dissatisfaction.
To put out ‘IT fires,’ HELPLINE sees AI as a strategic imperative and is actively pursuing the right implementation. AI is already used on one service desk, but for more wide-ranging adoption, HELPLINE saw its use of AI had to meet three essential criteria:
Natural – easy to use and interact with
Customer centric – it must improve efficiency for the end user
Mandatory – it will be part of the agent experience, not the customer
In this context, HELPLINE evaluated different touch points for AI and how to incorporate it strategically.
"“Each time a user from one of our clients reaches out to us, it means that person is stressed, even overwhelmed. An outage impacting his or her work could potentially impact the entire team’s work—or even the company’s. At HELPLINE, in a sense, we are the IT emergency first responders for our clients.”"
- Lionel Florence Director of Digital User Journeys at HELPLINEDriving Smart AI Innovation with SightCall VISION
HELPLINE is now leveraging AI to reduce device downtime and optimize service with a different touchpoint: the franchise-side.
With SightCall VISION, HELPLINE uses AI to cut minutes out of every service interaction by enabling franchises themselves to collect critical device information with a smart device camera and send it to a support agent—before a service call even starts.
After this “Pre-Call Information Collection,” SightCall VISION and HELPLINE do the rest.
The designated employee at the franchise only needs to invest a few seconds—three clicks and one photo—to capture critical device information. HELPLINE agents no longer need to ask repetitive diagnostic questions because they will already have all the necessary information at their fingertips.
As a result of this minimal time investment, franchises win back several minutes (or more) in efficiency and reduced device downtime.
The Impact of The Right Touchpoint
This key business outcome is underpinned by SightCall VISION’s Smart OCR.
When notifying HELPLINE of an outage, a franchise’s employee, its PoC for IT issues, uses a designated tablet on site to identify the malfunctioning device via SightCall VISION.
After selecting the IT issue, the employee is guided step-by-step to locate the device’s serial number decal and take a photo.
SightCall VISION’s Smart OCR ingests the entire decal, uses AI to automatically scan the photo, pinpoint the serial number, and identify the malfunctioning device. Then, it uses an asset management integration to identify more critical information, such as where the device is, which franchise employee is using it, and when it was put in operation.
The employee no longer wastes time verbalizing a string of numbers and letters or broadly describing a device to diagnose a problem. Each piece of collected information goes instantly to a HELPLINE agent.
After a pre-call process lasting only few seconds, the HELPLINE agent has all of the information needed to provide accurate, contextualized, and personalized service.
Instead of asking repetitive identifying questions at the beginning of an interaction, HELPLINE agents can dive directly into resolving problems, saving time, energy, and cost while fulfilling their SLAs and improving CX.
Franchise employee contacts IT Support for help with an issue
Employee collects equipment’s serial number with Smart OCR
HELPLINE agent receives information before IT support call begins
HELPLINE agent guides the franchise employee through resolving the issue
"“At HELPLINE we are convinced that the most important quality of IT support for users is still human contact, from their ability to listen and support with empathy. This comes from our knowledge of our users and their needs, enabling us to know how to integrate AI into a digital journey and train it to provide support that ensures it is accepted, adopted, and meets the expectations of our users.”"
- Lionel Florence Director of Digital Journeys, HELPLINEAI in the contact center is here to stay, but it is only as good as the touchpoint, implementation strategy, and focus on supporting personalized, empathic support interactions. SightCall VISION and HELPLINE will continue to drive CX together by strategically using AI to enable customers, empower agents, and streamline operations.
