Icwhatuc offers companies a new perspective
Trouble with a garage door and the frustration of waiting for service prompted Guillermo Salazar to seek a better way to co-ordinate a number of repair situations.
The result was the launch two years ago — along with co-founders Luke Kreiger and Danny
Way — of a Calgary startup called Icwhatuc that is revolutionizing the way companies serve customers.
Salazar earned a finance degree at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business and since then has shown his appreciation for the school in his ninth year as a member of its management advisory committee and is past-chair of the Haskayne Alumni Board.
After graduation, he began a 21-year career in consulting, left PWC to start his own ERP firm and then sold Quatro Integration Group to Deloitte Consulting.
His entrepreneurial interests meant starting another company of his own, and Salazar set about finding a solution to the frustration of dialing into a call centre and then waiting at home all day and trying to verbally communicate a problem and then arranging to get it fixed.
The team tasked Calgary-based Bridgewater Labs to build what is the world’s first Augmented Reality (AR) customer video service that allows companies to see what their customers see in real time.
The result is that Icwhatuc is able to cut time between problem discovery and problem resolution; a tool that has allowed companies such as ATCO to help reduce what used to be hours of wait time for their customers down to a current average of only eight minutes.
One of the first firms Salazar approached, ATCO took the bold, innovative step in October 2018 to test Icwhatuc, and in June of 2019 launched its new way of communicating with customers.
When a call is received, the customer is simply asked to click onto Icwhatuc — no apps, logins or passwords — and point their smartphone at the object of concern. A technician is then able to diagnose the problem and give directions while seeing exactly what the customers is looking at.
For decades, it had been the case with many providers to call a number, wait for a response, explain the difficulty, and then wait for the arrival of a technician, who was, hopefully, able to detect the problem and have the right parts or tools to get equipment working again.
That has changed with Icwhatuc; not only are things cleared up in minutes, but costs are cut by saving truck traffic and travel time. Every trip is expensive.
The company serves many customers throughout Canada and the U.S., mainly in the utilities and construction industries. ATCO Australia uses the program and trials are being held in Europe. An Ontario utility is able to have a customer record a meter reading in 55 seconds with just one click onto the browser, saving a visit from the meter reader.
A Calgary company is using Icwhatuc to work with its employees in the field, able to share questions with staff engineers to resolve any situation; Bravo Target Safety is capturing remote work site audits using video communications with AR; and New Home Warranty in Alberta and British Columbia is making good use of the new technology.
The future looks very bright for Icwhatuc, focusing on transforming customer experiences for any organization currently delivering help in a company truck.
And the method really is simple; a video on the company website explains how to inflate a bicycle tire — tough to try to give such directions over a telephone.
NOTES
Fraserview Meat has been serving communities in the Vancouver area for more than 20 years and has now expanded into Alberta with its first two outlets in Edmonton and Calgary. The Calgary shop opened last week in Castleridge Plaza, N.E., a new venture for Harkharn Kalkat and his family. He says after graduating in accounting at Mount Royal University he began researching a business he could run and found Fairview Meats. Impressed with its good reputation and as provider of meats for Sobeys Chalo! Freshco chain, he secured the franchise for southern Alberta. Already popular within the surrounding communities, it features 40 products consisting chiefly of flavours of chicken, lamb, fish and goat meat.