EDP Comercial, the EDP group energy business serving customers in Portugal, uses an augmented reality visual-support service so that customer-service assistants can see a customer's problem through the customer's own smartphone camera. EDP Comercial's director of B2C energy services said the company had found it hard for customers to show a fault in a way that helped remote troubleshooting, so it looked for an AR solution to support a technical-support area tied to its Serviço Funciona service, which covers household white goods such as washing machines, dishwashers and fridges.
The service is Vodafone Portugal's Visual Support, powered by TechSee. A June 2021 release said EDP had deployed it in multiple subsidiaries for consumers and field technicians. Dinheiro Vivo reported in May 2022 that EDP Comercial's rollout materialised in October 2021.
How it works
- The assistant opens a session; the customer needs only a mobile phone, receives an SMS and, on accepting, shares the phone's camera image.
- The technology is browser-based, and EDP Comercial described implementation as quick and easy and SaaS-based.
- Assistants can circle an object to focus attention, take a photo, annotate it and show it on the customer's screen, for example guiding which cable goes into which socket.
- Optical character recognition reads the brand, model and serial number of equipment from the camera image.
Scale and reported results
As of May 2022, EDP Comercial reported:
- 22 assistants handling calls with the solution
- more than 6,500 visual-support sessions since launch
- 13% of cases no longer needing a team sent to the customer's home, when the session follows failed standard troubleshooting
These figures are EDP Comercial's own, reported in the article rather than independently measured.
Wider use and next steps
The June 2021 release also described EDP using the technology to carry out remote site surveys before solar panel installation, and said EDP was exploring expansion to additional subsidiaries and geographies. EDP Comercial's next step, according to the May 2022 article, was integration into its Zero app.
