cfx_september-2024 - 30

NEw ToolS
Hotwire Bringing AI Into the Field
By Cathy Applefeld Olson
Hotwire Communications employees are putting AI to work in the field every day.
" Sometimes a company can get caught up
chasing a technology and needing to find
a home for it. We started with the business
need. "
AI has seized the attention of the industry.
Hotwire Communications' approach to
adopting it, as explained by VP of customer
experience and process operations Matt
Wilson, is a success story that foresees
robust evolution for the company.
" We are very committed to innovation,
and innovation that always links back to
our strategy-to differentiate on quality, to
offer white glove service, to have disruptive
technology to help our people have a
better business experience, " Wilson says.
" That guides what we are going to deploy. "
To that end, Wilson and the Hotwire operations
and customer experience teams
started down the line with TechSee to deploy
visual AI-artificial intelligence that
teaches machines to make sense of images
and visual data the same way people
do-to aid customers installing equipment.
Quickly, they realized they had a more
immediate use case: using the AI to aid
field technicians with complex installs
that require more than 15 steps of quality
control ranging from meter reading to
light levels. Traditionally, technicians were
capturing photos of each step, sending
them back and forth to determine whether
the results were acceptable, and the next
steps.
" This process was manual-intensive 100
percent of the time, " Wilson says. " They
were all sending photos back and forth
30
and filling out forms before. Now with
TechSee, we turned these 15 steps that
were about capturing pictures to real-time
walk-throughs, real-time pass/fail on each
step, so that by the time the technician
gets to the end of the list, he knows at that
moment if he passed the quality check.
This stuck out as being a really powerful
technology to put in employees' hands, so
that they could get a real-time pass or fail
on what they're doing. "
In the three months since deployment,
Wilson says the team has reported a 15%
faster workflow. " Our back office no longer
needs to manually review work orders for
these types of installs, " he says. Feedback
from employee satisfaction is also strong.
" They feel like we are giving them the best
tool possible to be successful, " he says.
Hotwire will begin using AI for the customer
installs and troubleshooting next
year, and begin to bring generative AI into
the equation. " For generative AI we're focused
on, how do we make the employee
that much more successful and keep our
reputation strong as we grow, " Wilson says.
For network operations he envisions using
it to kick off tasks and recap notes about
incidents so everyone involved sees the
same information. For customer service,
he says it will aid in the different sources
a customer service representative might
need to reference during a call or task.
" We're trying to create a ChatGPT-style
experience that gives the agent an answer
on the fly instead of them going through a
bunch of articles and all that hang time on
September 2024
the phone, and give them the immediate
conversational question and answer back
to the agent so they can help the customer
quickly. "
As AI evolves at warp speed, Wilson says
it's incumbent on companies to keep up
with the latest from vendor partners. " And
as a business leader you have to cut between
what is real AI disruption we should
pay attention to and what's the same old
stuff with a different name, " he warns. " It's
easy to get caught up. You've got to be able
to read the difference between the two. "
Hotwire Communications has
more than 1,800 employees.
During the past five years the
company has built thousands
of fiber miles, providing more
than 350,000 residential and
commercial customers with
telecom services including data,
voice, video, security and other
broadband-based services.
As use cases warrant, AI will be
an essential part of the business
model as Hotwire expands.
CablefaxTopOps.com
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