SightCall Fall Release Helps Service Organizations Dealing with Covid-19

The challenges of this year have had repercussions throughout industries, and particularly for service delivery organizations supporting customers and field technicians. Balancing the need to continue services with the safety of both workers and customers is paramount.

Live video-based visual assistance has proven an indispensable tool for many who need to provide support for highly technical objects. It allows organizations to rapidly diagnose and resolve issues while minimizing exposure keeping both employees and customers safe.

As the Covid-19 pandemic began to sweep through the world, we experienced a strong uptick of usage as organizations turned to SightCall for help. As SightCall was pressed into service to address entirely new business units and use cases, we received requests for SightCall to work in new ways.

Given the nature of the pandemic, we decided to shift our focus entirely to responding to these customer requests. This software release directly addresses the needs of SightCall users to help them through the Covid-19 crisis.

As organizations rapidly transitioned into using virtual tools for delivering service, many workers have moved into delivering support for the first time or to providing service for equipment they may not have experience with.

To help quickly onboard workers in these situations, we’ve vastly improved SightCall multiparty support. With a robust multiparty capability, technicians have the ability to add peers to virtual service calls who are more knowledgeable. This allows for rapid on-the-job training and the ability to provide assistance when a technician is faced with an unknown situation. The net result is shortening the time for a new technician to become effective.

In order to minimize exposure of workers and customers, organizations are turning to customer self-service. Rather than sending technicians on-site to perform simple repairs , a video session can be used to assess the issue and often guide the customer to perform the repair themselves. With a remotely guided self-service approach, organizations can eliminate unnecessary exposure and resolve issues more quickly.

SightCall is already a great tool for providing remote guidance to novice users. However, to streamline the process and make it easier, we’ve made several enhancements to make the process of joining calls much easier. By expanding our no-download WebRTC support, we can ensure that users can even more easily join a SightCall session with a consistent user experience

whether they are using the Visual Support mobile app or joining with their web browser via WebRTC.

With organizations using visual assistance for a broader range of use cases, the need for more communication tools has arisen. Precise communication is crucial when remote experts are working with people in the field who are dealing with highly technical issues. Along with video that allows the expert to accurately see the issue and voice as a means for two-way communications, on-screen annotations provided one of the best ways to provide guidance. Using annotations, the expert can directly markup the video image to illustrate live the steps to resolving issues.

With so many new use cases it was clear a broad range of annotations tools were required. SightCall has dramatically expanded the annotations capabilities built into the product with a range of additional tools. Experts can now place animated tools, such as screwdrivers, wrenches, etc., directly on the video image to illustrate how to perform the needed service. Also, a library of symbols and text boxes can easily be placed on the video image to convey information. This richer set of annotation tools make remote guidance easier and more accurate.

We are excited about these improvements in the SightCall platform and we are proud to be helping our users continue to deliver excellent service more efficiently while keeping everyone safe during this unprecedented time.