As More Sophisticated Consumer Electronics Products Enter the Market, Can Customer Care be Simplified?

As is the case every year, following hot on the heels of the holiday season is the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which in 2023 starts January 5. The theme this year is “Be In It” which reflects the elevating interest in immersive, intuitive, and frictionless experiences delivered by more intelligent software and devices, more powerful mobile phones, 10X faster 5G speeds and personalization at a level we’ve never seen before  from healthcare to automotive to Web and the metaverse.

While the jury is out on the true potential of the metaverse, brought into public view in part by Facebook’s brand name change to Meta, there is no question that Web3 is making much more cinematic and contextual digital living possible and while that sounds ideal, the fact is that the devices, software, networks, and infrastructure, in general, must work seamlessly to deliver that idealistic immersive experience.

What happens when the metaverse breaks?

CareAR is a Xerox Company, a high growth company bringing connected field service applications into the “extended reality” (XR) era. It is also a partner of ServiceNow, a juggernaut in the globally connected field service industry. Together, the two announced a very different new offering they call “Experience Builder.”

In short, this cloud-based software platform as a service makes it easy to build and evolve self-guided support to the end-consumer of a consumer electronic product and to the customer service agents and field service technicians who haven’t always been able to orchestrate even the simplest challenge.

For example, when a new fiber service is installed in a home, bringing a new hub WiFi6 integrated router and connection to the Internet, 5G speeds, a new set-top box, a new remote, and a new mobile app – it is exciting, but as we know – also intimidating.

For the service provider, getting it right matters, as they have spent the money to attract new customers who can bring them years of MRR and ARR and will buy more services the happier they are. Every end customer has a different experience with technical products – and truck rolls are expensive – so it is in the service provider’s best interest to deliver an excellent experience from day one and to troubleshoot quickly and effectively, when it’s needed.

Experience Builder makes it easier and far less expensive for the product, customer success, marketing and implementation teams to collaborate with each other and provide a “guided journey” to reach positive experience. Business teams within the company, with no coding skills, can now, with “drag and drop” ease, build and change, evolve, and expand everything from quick starts to mobile devices to visually intuitive content that illustrates immediate what plugs in where.

The company worked with customers, distributors, partners, and product developers to build CareAR’s Experience Builder, a no-code, hyper-visual augmented reality and AI-based design tool that enables anyone to create self-guided instructional experiences at scale over the last year.

Organizations can now rapidly design and deploy intelligent and immersive self-guided instructional experiences for field technicians, employees, or customers viewed on standard mobile devices or wearables.

“It’s truly exciting to witness the tangible results that our customers substantially reported while easily creating and consuming self-guided instructional experiences utilizing CareAR Instruct and Experience Builder,” said Sam Waicberg, Co-founder and President of CareAR. “The service experience is ripe for transformation. Service workers and customers deal with massive amounts of static paper and pdf-based content. The flexibility to generate new or modify existing instructional flows in a matter of minutes and automatically make those updates available is nothing short of revolutionary.”

Through a digital and visual design, instructional experiences are extremely intuitive and incorporate 2D content such as video along with CareAR’s patented 3D augmented reality, digital twin visualization, and AI computer vision for visual verification of steps or task completion, ensuring high levels of productivity, accuracy, and consistency.

Furthermore, self-service instructional experiences can seamlessly be added to level up any service management workflow, product offering, or asset ranging across industries and B2B or B2C use cases, from maintenance, inspection, and repair to manuals, unboxing, set-up guides, tutorials, and frequent how-to’s.

Both CareAR Instruct and Experience Builder offer an interactive and memorable service experience that better connects customers and employees while optimizing the way enterprises operate. Employees become more engaged when learning and employing new technology, and customers receive improved service and support that is efficient and effective.

“Augmented Reality use cases are rapidly expanding due to value being realized in worker enablement and immersive engagement,” said Eric Abbruzzese, Research Director at ABI Research. “A solution like the CareAR SXM platform helps organizations realize that value at scale, with key capabilities like no-code step-by-step guidance creation through Experience Builder quickening time to value.”

Finally, CareAR’s Experience Builder can also help boost employees’ skills through training or help subsidize a lack of experience through real-time analytics and other generated data. This comes at just the right time, as the current talent shortage is a challenge, as 40 percent of companies say that they lose specialized knowledge and expertise faster than they can gain it.

“For many of our customers, it’s not practical or cost-effective to come to the data center for IT management and maintenance tasks,” said Thomas Cannady, Cyxtera’s Vice President of Network Services. “Our Remote Hands with Visual Assist support – which leverages CareAR Instruct and Experience Builder – allows our customers to participate in live sessions with our technicians, seeing what they see through smart glasses in real-time or through a self-guided instructional experience. CareAR helps us to empower our customers to get more involved and to get more resolved in their support experience via intelligent and interactive content.”