Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Thomas Cottereau, CEO of SightCall:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: SightCall, headquartered in San Francisco, is the global leader in augmented reality (AR)-powered visual assistance. Our robust video platform is built to facilitate live interactions that help organizations solve service problems with customers and technicians remotely. We launched in 2008 and have since expanded our operations to include satellite offices in Austin, Boston, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Melbourne and Singapore. We have more than 15 CRM and management software integrations and serve a variety of industries including heavy manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, automotive and more.
We pursue both accessibility and sophistication, remaining at the cutting-edge by constantly refining our proprietary platform that is simple enough for first-time users but robust enough for technicians in the field. SightCall customers realize marked KPI including an average 50% decrease in truck rolls as well as boosts in customer satisfaction and improved first call resolution times.
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Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: We are thrilled about this boost to R&D investment and the upcoming expansion to our AR and AI capabilities. This Series B funding round of $42 million was led by InfraVia Capital Partners, along with co-investor Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund.
As a leading global AR-powered visual assistance platform, this allows us to continue as a market innovator and grow the more than 200 enterprises that already benefit from SightCall.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: What our users see and feel on a day-to-day basis are greater operational efficiency and reduced barriers to connecting with customers. Many of them adopt our tool to boost a particular KPI or realize a certain organizational objective, only to see myriad other benefits emerge post-implementation.
Take field services: One of our oil and gas clients, for example, operates across 120 countries with a broad range of services that include gas and steam turbines, offshore rigs and hydropower. Over the past year, it had a dual goal of mitigating the disruption posed by COVID-19 in the short-term, along with reducing its ecological footprint through more sustainable operations in the long-term. Using SightCall visual assistance, the company could still conduct rig inspections despite travel restrictions for technicians, taking counters and collecting serial numbers from up to 10 meters away, and taking accurate measures of platform edges. In under a year, these remote inspections had cut travel costs for the company between 400% and 500% overall, or thousands of dollars for each visit.
In customer service, empowerment goes a long way. That’s the advantage of SightCall. Augmented reality overlays, combined with artificial intelligence features and a customer’s ability to access SightCall from their own mobile device, not only produces faster solutions to things like product repair and maintenance, but also it substantially broadens user knowledge. When a washing machine breaks and a remote expert can guide either a field technician or the customer themselves through the solution – able to use a smartphone to illuminate, draw, point and so on – it makes people more immersed and familiar with the tools in their lives. That is hugely rewarding for us.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: Because SightCall fully owns our technology and built our platform from the ground up, we’re able to continuously evolve our integration suite and service capabilities. Our most recent additions are partnerships with Microsoft Dynamics 365, ServiceNow and SAP Field Service Management. Some of our new features include the No App Experience, which enables access to SightCall sessions by clicking a link without the need for installation, a self-service workflow builder, photo annotation and speech translation tools, and AI-powered automatic audio transcripts. Together, this boosts operational efficiency and the transformative power of our platform for users.
Over the past three years, we’ve seen 100% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue. Our current goal is $100 million in annual recurring revenue, which will allow us to further enhance our tech capabilities and continue to think big about what remote visual assistance can do. We’ve spent more than a decade carefully building and optimizing a network across data centers close to where all our customers are, so we are well-positioned to touch and transform new markets and industries with our platform.
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Q: What is a great thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: One thing we’re extremely proud to offer is the highest level of compliance with data privacy regulations, including GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA. An often-overlooked benefit of this is that global companies can rely on a single remote assistance tool across the entire geographical breadth of their operations, maximizing ROI for an enterprise’s digital transformation efforts. Privacy and security are extremely important to our organization, especially with a product that is used to solve problems anywhere in the world – including homes.
Last Updated on July 18, 2021
