Mobile barcode scanning software shortens Cincinnati Bell service calls
Scandit, an enterprise technology platform for mobile computer vision and augmented reality (AR), announced that telecommunications service provider Cincinnati Bell is using Scandit's Keyboard Wedge on its technicians' Samsung Galaxy S8 Active devices to improve customer service and employee productivity during home and office service calls.
“Our service technicians love using the Keyboard Wedge from Scandit,” said Brian Golden, Vice President of Field Operations at Cincinnati Bell. “We started using Keyboard Wedge right away without needing to make any changes to our provisioning system, and Scandit continues to give us any guidance and support that we need right away. We’ve achieved improved scanning accuracy in all conditions and made our service calls shorter.”
Before Scandit, Cincinnati Bell’s service technicians used dedicated barcode scanning devices attached to laptops with 3-foot USB cables, to record equipment activation. The dedicated scanners captured the barcodes on the equipment and fed the information back to a provisioning system that could be accessed from the laptop.
Cincinnati Bell reports that this system presented many complications for the technicians because equipment had to be near the laptop, bad lighting made barcodes hard to read for the scanner, and damaged barcodes required manual entry, which led to errors. In many cases, technicians would leave customers’ homes and offices and go to their vehicles to capture the barcodes and activate the equipment.
After deciding this approach needed to change, Cincinnati Bell pursued Scandit's smartphone-based mobile workflow for their service technicians. When basic use of a smartphone camera to scan barcodes didn’t do the job, the service provider switched to Scandit’s enterprise-grade Keyboard Wedge scanning software. Keyboard Wedge is a turnkey solution that adds a barcode scanning button to the keyboard of any smart device without requiring any integration or app changes.
“As a company that literally comes into people’s homes and offices, Cincinnati Bell appreciates the importance of the human element in what they do,” concludes Samuel Mueller, CEO of Scandit. “By replacing an outdated activation process with a flexible mobile workflow using Keyboard Wedge, Cincinnati Bell has improved productivity and customer and employee satisfaction.”
