By Lynn Greiner
KITCHENER – A small Ontario company is helping ISPs and telcos around the world keep customers and technicians safe during the Covid-19 crisis when service issues arise.
In response to the pandemic, RouteThis is offering a component of its SaaS solution at no charge to companies which need to send technicians out to replace equipment, so that the techs can drop the gear at the door, then sit in their vehicle, safely distanced, and guide the customer through installation and configuration remotely with the help of RouteThis’s LiveView functionality. Cincinnati Bell has already used the technology to take 300 technicians remote within 48 hours.
RouteThis came into being about three years ago when co-founder and CEO Jason Moore carved out the support component he’d built into a previous product and commercialized it. His rationale? Call center agents often can’t tell what the customer’s problem actually is. They can’t see what the customer sees, and as anyone who has worked in support can testify, that can lead to frustration on both sides as well as inaccurate diagnoses and unnecessary technician visits.
RouteThis originally helped the agent determine the customer’s problem quickly, which shortened call time, decreased repeat calls and, unexpectedly, cut down on the number of technician visits.
“Sending out a technician is a huge loss leader,” Moore explained. “Enabling these telecommunications companies to identify when technicians are actually required inside the customer’s home and when they’re not is immensely valuable to them and saves an enormous amount of amount of time and money. We talked to a sophisticated telecom and they believe at least 40% of the time technicians go out on the road each day, the trips are completely unnecessary. So that’s literally 40 percent of the time a technician puts his key in the truck and turns it on, and they didn’t need to.”
“Fast forward to today, and there’s almost been this tectonic shift where customers are now telling telcos: ‘I need you to fix my issue, but do not send me a technician. I don’t want one in my house.’” – Jason Moore, RouteThis
“We started there,” he continued. “Since then we’ve gotten more into the resolution side as well.”
The company offers tools that not only let the agent see what the customer sees, it lets them resolve many of the issues remotely. For example, if a customer is having Wi-Fi issues, the problem may just be that the modem is in the wrong place. That’s something the customer can fix with the right guidance. (Pictured is a screen cap of a RouteThis-powered live video help session.)
Using a RouteThis connection to the customer’s phone, the agent can scan the environment and identify problems (perhaps interference on the channel the modem is using, finding bad placement), analyze and fix modem settings or tell the custome
r how to move the modem to a better spot in the home and hook it up again. It doesn’t matter if the customer is using the ISP’s equipment or has dropped in their own boosters, for example, because the RouteThis dashboard presents a standardized view.
Security and privacy are key, too. Moore said they were built into the architecture so that connections are encrypted end-to-end, and RouteThis will only stay connected as long as the agent is actively on a call with the customer. Once the call ends, all consents granted by the customer are automatically revoked.
“It’s a weird, weird world,” he noted. “Ninety days ago, customers were getting on the phone with their ISP and screaming at them to send technicians to their home to fix issues. Fast forward to today, and there’s almost been this tectonic shift where customers are now telling telcos: ‘I need you to fix my issue, but do not send me a technician. I don’t want one in my house.’ It’s a shift, but I think many service providers and many ISPs users are trying to quickly adapt.”
