CareAR™, A Xerox company and trusted service experience management (SXM) market leader. Last month, they announced the availability of CareAR Experience Builder, a new visual augmented reality and AI-based design tool that enables anyone to create self-guided instructional experiences at scale.
The company has been on a fast track for the last few years. While acquiring other companies to expand their capabilities and customers, they are also innovating in the Extended Reality (XR) world. Their developments include a range of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences that have proven ROI with implementations that have paid for themselves in a matter of months versus years.
XR, the umbrella category, is a term for technologies that enhance or replace our view of the world. In the metaverse, this is often through overlaying or immersing computer text and graphics into real-world, virtual, or both environments.
The next Internet is converging real, digital, and virtual worlds into new realities and is accessible across many mobile devices. With the massive growth of 5G networking, speeds can go up to 10X faster compared to legacy cellular networks and are powering more creative, prescriptive solutions that further automate maintenance in a self-healing manner.
Still, things will always break in the heavy metal category of expensive, sensitive, and highly productive modern manufacturing equipment. Given the loss caused by factory downtime, quick fixes are necessary to avoid potentially catastrophic financial and reputational losses.
The developers at CareAR have been working across many industry sectors, including manufacturing. Through the often-difficult process of building digital interactive manuals, they took it a step further. They not only built the software tools but also created a visual instructional designer platform that last month they unveiled as one that radically simplifies the creation of those manuals with a no-code, drag-and-drop interface.
“Organizations can now rapidly design and deploy intelligent and immersive self-guided instructional experiences for not only third-party field technicians, but the OT and IT employees on-site, which require no special hardware, as these manuals can be viewed on standard mobile devices or wearables,” said Sam Waicberg, Co-Founder and President at CareAR. “Everyone is instantly empowered anytime with expertise and guidance that allows them to perform heightened functions and independently complete tickets and tasks faster, and while we have been delivering better experiences over the last few years, what is different today is how we are making it possible for manufactures of advanced factory equipment to design and maintain their own manuals, as the experts. This saves time and money, in the immediate and long term.”
Through a digital and visual design, the instructional experiences are extremely intuitive. It incorporates 2D content such as video along with CareAR’s patented 3D augmented reality, digital twin visualization, and AI computer vision for visual verification of steps or task completion, ensuring high levels of productivity, accuracy, and consistency.
“It’s truly exciting to witness the tangible results that our customers substantially reported while easily creating and consuming self-guided instructional experiences utilizing CareAR Instruct and Experience Builder,” Waicberg continued. “The service experience is ripe for transformation. Service workers and customers deal with massive amounts of static paper and pdf-based content. The flexibility to generate new or modify existing instructional flows in a matter of minutes, and automatically make those updates available is nothing short of revolutionary.”
Adding these self-service instructional experiences is seamless and can level up any service management workflow, product offering, or asset ranging across industries. Adding to B2B or B2C use cases can also enhance other self-service instructional experiences, from maintenance, inspection, and repair to manuals, unboxing, set-up guides, tutorials, and frequent how-tos.
“Building immersive experiences in CareAR’s Experience Builder enables our operatives to have real-time access to the most accurate information, responding to incidents with the expertise needed to resolve issues right the first time. The results are improved safety and compliance, faster and more cost-effective resolutions, and improved customer experiences – which we can continuously refine and improve,” said Ralph Powell, Business Development Director, Sapphire Utility Solutions. “We are continuously seeking new ways of thinking and working collaboratively with our partners as a catalyst for change. If we can rethink the systems and technologies underpinning some of our processes, then we remove costs and improve outputs for our customers.”
Both CareAR Instruct and CareAR Experience Builder offer an interactive and memorable service experience that better connects customers and employees while optimizing the way enterprises operate. Employees become more engaged when learning and employing new technology, and customers receive improved service and support that is efficient and effective.
“Augmented Reality use cases are rapidly expanding due to value being realized in worker enablement and immersive engagement,” said Eric Abbruzzese, Research Director at ABI Research. “A solution like the CareAR SXM platform helps organizations realize that value at scale, with key capabilities like no-code step-by-step guidance creation through Experience Builder quickening time to value.”
Finally, CareAR’s Experience Builder can also help boost employees’ skills through training or help subsidize a lack of experience through real-time analytics and other generated data. This comes at just the right time, as the current talent shortage is a challenge, as 40 percent of companies say that they lose specialized knowledge and expertise faster than they can gain it.
“For many of our customers, it’s not practical or cost-effective to come to the data center for IT management and maintenance tasks,” said Thomas Cannady, Cyxtera‘s Vice President of Network Services. “Our Remote Hands with Visual Assist support – which leverages CareAR Instruct and Experience Builder – allows our customers to participate in live sessions with our technicians, seeing what they see through smart glasses in real-time or through a self-guided instructional experience. CareAR helps us to empower our customers to get more involved and to get more resolved, in their support experience via intelligent and interactive content.”
To learn more, visit https://carear.com/carear-instruct/ and https://carear.com/experience-builder.
