SAN FRANCISCO, U.S. — SightCall, the world’s leading augmented reality (AR)-powered visual assistance platform, today announced its partnership with Italy’s Lavazza Group to offer AR-powered remote visual assistance for customer care and maintenance of its coffee machines. One of the world’s most important coffee roasters and a global enterprise with products and distributors in more than 140 countries, Lavazza Group is accelerating its use of virtual assistance technologies to support the ongoing expansion of its product portfolio and continued efforts to become more responsive to fast-changing consumer needs.
“We are proud to partner with Lavazza Group to provide global service solutions for easier and faster product maintenance and repair,” said Thomas Cottereau, founder and CEO of SightCall. “Now more than ever, the world’s top brands are turning to digital support that allows them to provide issue resolution with minimal service disruption. SightCall will enable Lavazza to work through customer care issues immediately, maintaining their hard-earned reputation for high-quality coffee products.”
SightCall provides the company with a comprehensive visual support tool for customer service agents to guide customers to troubleshoot issues, such as descaling coffee machines or basic accessory maintenance remotely. The AR interface lets remote agents draw, point and highlight onto the customer’s smartphone, and high-definition picture assures the highest call qualities even in low-bandwidth environments. Device-agnostic, SightCall performs on a range of user products from smartphones and tables to specialist equipment such as smart glasses.
Lavazza Group, with more than 4,000 employees and revenues of more than EUR 2 billion (2020 Financial Statement), switched to SightCall from a previous visual assistance provider. This decision stemmed from its desire to move from a local approach to a global template offering maximum portability and seamless CRM integration, reinforced by strong GDPR compliance.
Lavazza first piloted SightCall with its customer service teams in France and Germany in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown in April. Customer support teams were impressed by the ease of use and the level of confidence quickly developed with the tool, providing them with good insight into how a long-term partnership would work.
The company has plans to scale up usage to 130+ customer support agents in seven countries over the next three years. The company plans to cover multiple regions of the world where it provides products, bolstered by the SightCall app’s ability to operate in 13 different languages. Lavazza will also increase the number of codes and use cases it applies SightCall to, with more readily available data from its CRM and responses to SightCall customer surveys telling it where visual assistance can best be deployed to resolve maintenance issues.
“Everywhere our coffee is consumed, Lavazza innovates to enhance the experiences of our customers and consumers, providing fast and accessible service when and where they need it,” said Maria Cristina Aspesi, Lavazza Group Customer Care Director. “With SightCall, we have chosen a solution that gives both central and local customer care teams a single, cutting-edge tool to help customers and consumers, increasing the number of support and interaction cases that can be solved instantaneously.”
