US telecommunications provider Cincinnati Bell replaced costly scanners and cumbersome cables with Scandit’s Keyboard Wedge on Samsung smartphones for barcode scanning in the field, improving customer service and boosting employee productivity during home and office service calls.
“Our service technicians love using the Keyboard Wedge from Scandit. We’ve achieved improved scanning accuracy in all conditions and made our service calls shorter.”
Brian Golden, Vice President of Field Operations at Cincinnati Bell
Goal:
Speed up service calls by replacing cumbersome equipment used by Field Service technicians
During service calls, Cincinnati Bell’s technicians were using dedicated barcode scanning devices attached to laptops with 3-foot USB cables, to record equipment activations. These traditional scanners captured the barcodes on the equipment and fed the information back to a provisioning system that could be accessed from the laptop.
This approach presented logistical 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 have to leave the customer’s home or office and go to their vehicle to capture barcodes and activate the equipment.
This approach needed to change to speed up service calls.
Solution:
Introduce high-performance barcode scanning on familiar smartphones – with no IT development
Cincinnati Bell wanted a smartphone-based workflow for their service technicians and first tried using the basic camera functionality of a smartphone to scan the barcodes. But this didn’t do the job well and they switched to Scandit’s enterprise-grade scanning software to get the fast, accurate scanning they needed for technicians in the field.
Cincinnati Bell were using Samsung Galaxy S8 smart devices and selected a Scandit turnkey solution that adds a barcode scanning button to the keyboard on any smart device without requiring any integration or app changes. The product is called Scandit Keyboard Wedge.
“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.”
Brian Golden, Vice President of Field Operations at Cincinnati Bell
Results:
Faster service calls with improved scanning that technicians love to use
Since deploying Scandit barcode scanning, Cincinnati Bell has been able to improve customer service and employee productivity during home and office service calls. Vice President, Field Operations, Brian Golden, said, “Our service technicians love using the Keyboard Wedge from Scandit. We’ve achieved improved scanning accuracy in all conditions and made our service calls shorter.”
Critical success factors for the Cincinnati Bell – Scandit partnership
- Fast, accurate barcode scanning is immediately enabled on smart devices with no need to make changes to provisioning systems.
- Expert guidance and technical support was provided right away.
- A new smartphone-based mobile workflow for service technicians makes service calls shorter.
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. By replacing an outdated activation process with a flexible mobile scanning workflow, Cincinnati Bell has improved productivity along with customer and employee satisfaction.
