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Though we spend ample time examining consumer-based XR endpoints, greater near-term impact is seen in the enterprise. This includes brands that use AR to promote products in greater dimension (B2B2C) and industrial enterprises that streamline their own operations (B2B).
These industrial endpoints include visual support in areas like assembly and maintenance. The idea is that AR’s line-of-sight orientation can guide front-line workers. Compared to the “mental mapping” they must do with 2D instructions, visual support makes them more effective.
And with VR, employee training and onboarding can be elevated through immersive sequences that boost experiential learning and memory recall. It also scales given that far-flung employees can get the same quality training, versus costly travel for senior training staff.
Altogether, there are micro and macro benefits to enterprise XR. The above micro efficiencies add up to worthwhile bottom-line impact when deployed at scale. Macro benefits include lessening job strain and closing the “skills gap,” which can preserve institutional knowledge.
But how is this materializing today and who’s realizing enterprise XR benefits? Our research arm ARtillery Intelligence tackled these questions in a recent report. It joins our report excerpt series, with the latest below on AR’s role in assisting field agents who are dispatched to fix things.
Atoms vs. Bits
Customer Engineering Services (CES) is an authorized service provider of help desk and onsite support for photo printing and other technologies. Due to a distributed customer base throughout North America, servicing this equipment is a considerable cost, due to travel time.
Not only is this a direct cost for deploying atoms rather than bits, but it results in equipment downtime which carries opportunity cost for its customers, thus impacting customer satisfaction and retention. All of these factors compelled CES to find ways to placeshift its support agents.
Using CareAR, CES adopted a system where its highest-value experts cover more ground by remotely assisting entry-level technicians at a given job site. They can evaluate live video feeds on their screens, diagnose issues, then provide visual guidance, text, arrows, and audio.
Those same experts can also execute visually-assisted sessions with a customer’s on-site staff to diagnose issues before deploying agents, or informing parts and resources needed. Altogether, CES achieved an 84 percent issue resolution rate and 70 percent technician positive feedback.
Case Study: Fujitsu Streamlines Assembly and Training with AR
Financial Impact
As for strategic takeaways, CES’ execution is a lesson in optimal resource deployment. In addition to the results it achieved for its customers – thus boosting customer satisfaction and retention for high-value accounts – the AR integration had immediate financial impact on CES itself.
Going deeper on that last point, service maintenance is a cost center for authorized service providers like CES, as opposed to a revenue-generating upsell. That means finding operational efficiencies and cost reductions in its support functions has direct bottom-line impact.
For example, by being able to dispatch novice agents to job sites, it avoids sending level-3 specialists, which are scarcer in number and greater in asset value. These savings are multiplied when talking about onsite maintenance processes that spread over several days.
Those level-3 specialists can instead support several dispatched techs at once. The result is yield optimization and lessening opportunity cost. It’s also worth noting that all the above was accomplished through upheld smartphones and tablets, making it a low-friction deployment.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next case study with more enterprise XR best practices and tactical takeaways…