For technicians needing just in time information, “the phone call is tough to beat. But there are opportunities to dramatically improve the experience.” Check us out www.airwave.us
RIP HoloLens. Despite MSFT investing $1+ billion into the product, it never delivered what technicians actually needed: quick access to the right information. For most industrial machinery, you’re not going to find any useful answers on google or chatgpt. The fastest solution is to call an expert. The next best option is to search through a file repository for the relevant manual. With HoloLens, you had to power up, log in, connect to Wi-Fi, and navigate multiple menus to get to the most useful app, which was reportedly a video call. FaceTime does it better and faster. And while Microsoft teased holographic overlays and step-by-step guides, the reality was that content almost never existed. Instead techs were zooming in on scanned PDFs and typing on an air keyboard. Tack on a $3,000 price tag for a fragile headset with a 2-hour battery life, and it’s no wonder this tech was dead on arrival for field technicians. The best products take the user to the point of value faster, while improving the experience all without needing to learn something new. The phone call is tough to beat. But there are opportunities to dramatically improve the experience. For example when the expert explains the fix and the call ends, the tech has to remember all the steps, or the expert stays on the call as the tech goes through them 1 by 1. Experts will often share part#s (ex: B43DSF-SD23) or other complex nomenclature that often takes multiple attempts to get right. Another issue is the expert often gets similar questions, so they repeat themselves all the time. Solving these problems was the starting point for Airwave. Also, what the heck is this guy even working on?