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Can you tell us about your role at DEF?
I am a technical expert within the National Technical Support Department at DEF. My role is central to supporting both products and field teams, from the moment they leave the factory to their implementation on-site. My responsibilities revolve around several key areas:
- Product qualification before market launch: I receive certified products fresh from the factory to check for any anomalies, unexpected behaviors, or illogical commissioning processes.
- Creation of product and technical guides: I design materials to assist users and help technicians build their skills, while also reducing recurring support requests.
- Technical support and hotline: I work daily to resolve issues encountered by technicians, where responsiveness is critical.
- Specialized technical expertise: I conduct more in-depth assessments, either remotely or directly on-site, depending on the complexity of the situation.
What do you enjoy about your job?
What I enjoy most about my job is the variety: the variety of what we see and what we do every day.
I also love the work itself—the process of providing solutions, exploring different possibilities for bugs or roadblocks, and really digging deep into the subject matter.
The goal is to then provide solutions, particularly thanks to the strong relationship we have with R&D. The aim is to integrate everything we identify as a blocker, or even just as a potential improvement.
What are the challenges you face on a daily basis?
My job is demanding. One of the main challenges is the technical nature of the role, which requires staying constantly up to date, being knowledgeable about a wide range of technical topics, and knowing how to quickly find the right information to be effective, especially under pressure.
What convinced you to publish your assistant on Ask DEF?
Today, the main advantage of the assistant is how easily it allows technicians to search through the vast number of documents available to them. It makes it possible to quickly find specific information within a large volume of content.
Nowadays, people read less and less and spend less time searching for information, often wanting an almost immediate answer. That is where the assistant provides real added value.
Another essential point is accessibility, especially from mobile devices. Currently, the DMS is only accessible from a computer. You have to take out your laptop, sometimes set up a hotspot... In the field, that can easily take fifteen minutes. With Ask DEF, you just take out your phone, ask the question, and the information you need is available in a minute.
Can you share a time when Ask DEF was useful to you?
Ask DEF is also about the ease of quickly finding information. For technical support, that is one of the major challenges.
We know that a document describing the issue and the steps to follow already exists. The strength of Ask is precisely its ability to find that information, clearly indicate the documents it relied on, and, on top of that, offer the user the ability to access the document directly by clicking on it.
What value do you see in Ask DEF?
Ask DEF is particularly interesting for pooling knowledge bases, especially regarding recurring business topics. We receive a lot of calls and we already capitalize on this information in ticketing software, but the idea would be for recurring questions to be automatically captured to grow the database.
With AI, an operator, even if they don't have the same technical level as an expert, can access potential solutions or even complete answers.
Ask DEF primarily allows you to:
- centralize business knowledge;
- capitalize on recurring questions;
- find similar cases;
- reach an initial answer faster;
- standardize the answers provided by experts.
While an AI may have limitations on certain topics it hasn't encountered yet, the advantage of Ask DEF is the ability to pose questions to the user community; the answer is then validated by an expert and captured by the AI. This allows it to know how to respond to the next request.
The more the database is populated, the more useful Ask becomes.
How do you see the evolution of Ask DEF?
The goal is for Ask DEF to become the go-to platform whenever a question arises.
Today, a lot of information is repetitive. This means that the answers already exist or can be integrated into Ask DEF, whether now or in the future. If the tool is used more, it will be able to centralize this knowledge and avoid asking the same questions over and over again.
Who would you recommend Ask DEF to?
With the capabilities of AI and the way Ask DEF can adapt to different topics based on needs, I think the tool can be opened up to anyone who needs to leverage information that is currently written down but difficult to access or underutilized.
Today, a lot of data is already written down, but it is sometimes buried on a hard drive or in a document management system that no one really takes the time to consult because it is too time-consuming: there are too many documents to open and too much content to sift through.
The topics are numerous, across all professions and for all types of needs.
The advantage of a closed AI, powered by internal and secure data, is precisely the ability to effectively leverage this information and add value in any industry.
