Cincinnati Bell Makes Service Calls Shorter With Scandit's Mobile Barcode Scanning

The telecommunications provider replaces costly hardware with Scandit’s Keyboard Wedge on Samsung smartphones for barcode scanning in the field

Scandit, the leading enterprise technology platform for mobile computer vision and augmented reality (AR), today announced that telecommunications service provider Cincinnati Bell is using Keyboard Wedge on Samsung Galaxy S8 Active devices to improve customer service and employee productivity during home and office service calls.

Before Scandit, Cincinnati Bell’s service technicians used dedicated barcode scanning devices attached to laptops with 3-foot USB cables, to record equipment activation. The dedicated scanners captured the barcodes on the equipment and fed the information back to a provisioning system that could be accessed from the laptop.

This system presented many 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 leave customers’ homes and offices and go to their vehicles to capture the barcodes and activate the equipment.

After deciding this approach needed to change, Cincinnati Bell pursued a new smartphone-based mobile workflow for their service technicians. When basic use of a smartphone camera to scan barcodes didn’t do the job, Cincinnati Bell switched to Scandit’s enterprise-grade scanning software. The Keyboard Wedge is a turnkey solution that adds a barcode scanning button to the keyboard on any smart device without requiring any integration or app changes.

“Our service technicians love using the Keyboard Wedge from Scandit,” said Brian Golden, Vice President of Field Operations at Cincinnati Bell. “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. We’ve achieved improved scanning accuracy in all conditions and made our 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,” said Samuel Mueller, CEO of Scandit. “By replacing an outdated activation process with a flexible mobile workflow using Keyboard Wedge, Cincinnati Bell has improved productivity and customer and employee satisfaction.”