Collabtic
Collaboration Platform for Service Organizations

After working in the after sales service business for more than two decades, Mohan Sethi noticed that while many collaboration tools and platforms were available in the market, none of them specifically catered to technicians or skilled service field workforce. Sethi’s experience enabled him to understand that collaboration plays a crucial role among technicians, as it helps them exchange knowledge of machine diagnosis and service with colleagues and industry peers. This prompted Sethi to develop a fit-for-purpose collaboration platform—Collabtic—to assist employees of a service firm in communicating effectively.

Sethi and the Collabtic team built a collaboration platform to connect technicians, service information, and machine data. The platform helps develop a knowledge base and provides content management module to store the information exchanged among the technicians and enables integration of machine data. In an interview with CIO Applications, Sethi talks about Collabtic’s features, the company’s approach to addressing customer requirements, and the future roadmap for their product portfolio.

What are the current trends and developments in the collaboration landscape, and how is Collabtic leveraging them?

There are two emerging technological trends in the market— artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT). While AI is proving to be a catalyst in making communication among workers more proactive, accurate, and human-like, IoT is helping firms integrate system data for faster diagnosis.

Kindly elaborate on the collaboration platform, Collabtic, and its features. How does it help your clients?

The fundamental concept of Collabtic focuses on fostering the exchange of ideas among the technicians of service organizations.

Consider a scenario where hundreds of skilled workers are employed on the field to manage various work orders. They are committed to completing these tasks according to the terms of service level agreements (SLAs) with reduced turnaround time while keeping the costs low and minimizing the number of parts replaced. Working under such conditions, however, increases the pressure on the technicians, as they may not always possess enough experience about the work assigned to them. Furthermore, contacting an expert or a colleague for assistance via traditional communication methods is time-consuming and often unproductive. Accessing back-office information is cumbersome. This is where Collabtic proves significant for field workers.

Collabtic helps technicians connect with their colleagues and harness information obtained during the field operations in to a knowledge base. This reduces the number of call-backs from customers, as the intelligence pertaining to replaced parts and field operations is saved and available on-demand.

Please elaborate on how knowledge base and content management help service organizations and technicians.

Today, availability of well-qualified and experienced technicians in the market is reducing drastically, who thoroughly understand every field job assigned to them. In such a scenario, retaining knowledge is crucial, and this is what knowledge base and content management can do. Both of these services help workers capture and store valuable information regarding field services for future reference.

However, unlike other platforms or software in the market, retrieving data from our knowledge base and content management module is not difficult, as their search results are segmented based on technicians’ needs. For instance, if a worker searches for the phrase ‘tire-pressure,’ the person might be hoping to find a resolution to a problem relating to tire-pressure or wanting to get more information about tire-pressure system or find a tool that can help with fixing tire-pressure system or simply find some training material. While a basic search result does not segregate outcomes based on a system or the usage of machine parts, Collabtic breaks down the results and helps technicians receive the appropriate information that they are looking for. All of these processes save time as well as reduce data consumption.

Could you share with us the onboarding process of Collabtic?

The onboarding process of Collabtic is seamless and straight-forward. Since most of our customers are already struggling with effective collaboration methods, we directly implement Collabtic for them, without many modifications, which include its core functionalities—communication platform, knowledge base, content management and machine data. However, our team also provides customization options for our clients.

Kindly elaborate on the customization services you offer.

One of the customizations is structuring the saved information such that technicians can track the reason for a machine’s possible failure and fix it accordingly. Another request we receive from our clients is to introduce some changes in the service workflow to better fit their needs. Often, they want to know about machine failure at the earliest and work on repairing it without delay; we customize Collabtic to help them monitor the health of various products through our platform. Additionally, we also customize how the client wants to organize their data such as manuals and instructions pertaining to machine parts in the content management module. Being a SaaS model, we are constantly releasing new features in the platform based on customer feedback.

Could you provide a customer success story where Collabtic helped a client improve communication among its technicians?

We helped Marco—one of the largest copier/printer solution providers—improves the communication among its technicians dispersed across the U.S. Before deploying Collabtic, Marco was looking for a fit-for-purpose collaboration platform. We enabled their technicians to seamlessly communicate, exchange knowledge and drive efficiencies. Collabtic is now used by over 3,000 technicians across the industrial space.

What plans do you have for the future, pertaining to geographical expansion or addition of new features to Collabtic?

As of now, we are planning to enhance the mobile experience of our clients and incorporate more use cases that technicians come across on a daily basis. Our key focus is also to pro-actively bring information and knowledge to technician’s attention based on their activity, instead of them having to search for it. Our team is also working toward forming alliances with companies that could provide relevant machine data to further expedite the diagnosis process.