Field operations can be one of the most complex aspects of a telecommunications business. Whether it’s because of process inefficiencies, inaccurate information, lack of proper equipment, or inexperience with an underlying issue, telco field service technicians often face delays when dealing with customer issues, forcing them to seek help from senior technical professionals. As a result, rather than servicing new customers or supporting existing ones, technicians spend time and resources on non-revenue-generating activities, which can reinforce an already less-than-perfect customer experience.
Envisioning solutions for field technicians
At Google Cloud, working to understand the constraints that technicians face in carrying out their work has helped us identify possible ways to increase their effectiveness.
For example, when troubleshooting a device, it’s often easier for a technician to upload a picture of the device and its surroundings rather than to describe the conditions in writing. In addition, if the technician is away from their vehicle, it can be hard for them to use a keyboard. Accordingly, audio, video, and images may be their preferred modalities for looking up or updating information. One common occurrence where we see this is when working to identify the root cause of an issue, where combining the information in the images with complex troubleshooting logic in field technician manuals or the device vendor documents is often required.
At the same time, technicians don’t always have time to capture all the details of the steps they took to fix a problem manually. Generative AI can automatically generate a draft transcript of their work, capturing customer incidents and their resolutions for future reference.
A bot that helps technicians with their current assignments could also significantly reduce errors and the time they spend waiting for help from senior technical professionals.
Google Cloud’s multimodal Gemini family of models offers exciting possibilities for improving field operations, which could in turn help Communications Service Providers (CSPs) increase customer satisfaction. Gemini can understand and reason about text, images, video, and code. It has multimodal reasoning capabilities and the ability to extract insights from documents through reading, filtering, and understanding information. Built into a multimodal AI assistant, we believe Gemini could help address the challenges faced by field technicians, increasing their effectiveness, the quality of their work, and customer satisfaction — while reducing the cost of redundant work and mistakes.
The below illustration highlights potential cross-functional benefits of a multimodal AI assistant to a technician, dispatcher/operator, and customer:
