AirTies, a supplier of managed Wi-Fi platforms to service providers, and Sweepr, a provider of simple care for the connected home, announced a new strategic alliance to help service providers reduce operating costs by identifying and resolving home connectivity issues, and pre-empting calls to customer care centers.
Specifically, the companies will integrate Sweepr’s cloud-based platform with AirTies Cloud, collaborate on joint customer deployments, and cooperate on future technology roadmaps and R&D efforts.
AirTies Cloud is a secure, GDPR-compliant platform that provides real-time visibility into subscribers’ home Wi-Fi performance, analysis on connected devices and data consumption patterns, and automated network optimization. This secure data will be used to inform Sweepr’s contextually adaptive technical support platform to help service providers respond to a consumer’s specific support requests via their digital self-care support channels such as voice assistants, mobile applications, chatbots, and more – reducing the need to contact a call center.
“In today’s challenging times, service providers are under immense pressure to deliver quality Internet service and manage costs. In fact, they need to do both simultaneously,” said Philippe Alcaras, CEO of AirTies. “Together, AirTies and Sweepr are bringing together the latest innovations in hybrid cloud-edge architecture self-optimizing networks, machine learning, and self-care technologies. For us, it’s key to the evolution of ‘Smart Wi-Fi’ – designed to help service providers improve the customer experience and lower operating costs.”
“Given the strain on both consumers and call centers, it’s imperative that technical support be available in the moment, rather than waiting on hold for a care agent – and that’s now more possible than ever before,” added Alan Coleman, founder and CEO of Sweepr. “One of the biggest generators of care costs are problems with subscriber home networks. As such, we are proud to be working with AirTies to help identify and mitigate those issues immediately, through intelligent data analysis and intuitive self-service.”
The combination of AirTies and Sweepr will enable self-help options that diagnose specific problems across home networks, devices, and services. Data analytics, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques are used to generate individualized, customer-friendly responses. For example, subscribers can ask simple questions like, “Why is my Netflix slow?”, or “Why is my game connection glitchy?”. Depending on the situation, Sweepr’s platform can then generate:
- Automated fixes (e.g., “We found and fixed the problem. Your tablet is sharing home Wi-Fi with other devices, so we prioritized it over other devices on your network. It should perform better now.”);
- Guided self-service (e.g., "We think we know what’s wrong. We are going to take you through simple steps about the placement of your home router. Also, someone in the home was using a lot of bandwidth on an older iPhone 4. When older devices like that stream video over Wi-Fi, it slows down all the newer Wi-Fi devices in the home. You might consider streaming video on a different device, if possible.”);
- Upgrade recommendations (i.e., “Looking at our tests and analysis, it seems you would benefit greatly by upgrading to a faster broadband Internet plan. Would you be interested in that?”); and/or
- Context assisted intervention (i.e., “We aren’t sure what the problem is but have many details of the issue. We will look into the situation and call you back with a solution.”).
The companies expect their integrations to be complete and available for trials with service providers in the coming weeks. Sweepr works with communication service providers and large appliance manufacturers and has clients in both North America and Europe.