Industrial Scientific leverages Oracle AI to revolutionize customer support
December 11, 2024 | 5 minute read
Authored by Barry Mostert, senior director of product marketing at Oracle, Bashir Rabile, principal cloud architect at Oracle, and Kellsey Ruppel, principal product marketing director at Oracle.
The authors want to thank Phanidhar Chilakapati, global data architect at Industrial Scientific, for his contributions.
Figure 1: Industrial Scientific is a leading safety equipment supplier.
Industrial Scientific, a part of the Fortive corporation, is a global leader in gas detection and safety solutions, providing life-saving technologies to industries worldwide. As a key manufacturer of gas detectors for the Oil and Gas sector, the company is committed to delivering innovative solutions that enhance safety, efficiency, and productivity. To further their mission, Industrial Scientific’s engineering team, led by their chief architect and director of Engineering, partnered with Oracle to implement an AI-powered solution that revolutionized their customer support operations.
Business challenges
Industrial Scientific faced the following critical challenges in their customer support operations:
- Support teams respond to approximately 1,200 requests per month regarding device issues, troubleshooting requests, and documentation queries
- Support teams were overwhelmed, leading to extended response times as they needed to consult multiple departments for answers
- Response times often stretched to days, significantly impacting customer experience
- Limited support capacity was creating bottlenecks in their service delivery
- Customer satisfaction was being affected by these operational inefficiencies
Oracle’s solution
After evaluating several AI platforms, Industrial Scientific built their solution using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)The solution, known as SensAI within Industrial Scientific, uses the following OCI services working together to automate customer support responses:
- OCI Generative AI: Uses Cohere’s R+ large language model (LLM) to process customer inquiries and generate accurate responses. Cohere was selected for its superior performance, enterprise-grade terms, and strict data privacy policies that prevent data sharing.
- OCI Generative AI Agents: Provides the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capability to extend user interactions with SensAI custom datasets, like product documentation.
- Autonomous Data Warehouse: Stores data generated from user interactions with the Generative AI and AI Agent (RAG) services. Data can be queried with natural language using the Select AI capability.
- Oracle APEX: Provides the SensAI chatbot style user interface and facilitates function calls that interacts with the Generative AI RAG agent.
- OCI Functions: Serverless functions that orchestrate the workflow, triggering when customer emails arrive and coordinating the processing steps between services to generate and deliver responses.
- OCI Streaming: Picks up responses generated by the language model and makes them available to Oracle Integration Cloud.
- Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC): Connects the company’s Salesforce instance with OCI services, enabling seamless flow of customer inquiries, contract information, and support responses between systems.
- OCI Object Storage: Houses the knowledge base of product documentation, troubleshooting guides, and support materials that the AI system references to provide documented, accurate responses.
Figure 2: Deployment architecture of SensAI.
“Moving from multiday email responses to automated, instant support has transformed how our technical teams operate, freeing them to focus on complex issues rather than routine inquiries,” says Phanidhar Chilakapati, global data architect at Industrial Scientific.
The solution works as an integrated pipeline: When a customer inquiry arrives in Salesforce, it triggers an OCI function that coordinates with the generative AI to analyze the question and generate a response based on documentation from OCI Object Storage. The response is then customized according to the customer’s support contract and returned through Salesforce. This automated process has transformed multiday response times into near-immediate, accurate support while maintaining proper documentation references and contract compliance.
According to Phanidhar, "finding an enterprise-ready AI solution that could securely handle our documentation and improve customer service requests was game-changing.”
Results
The implementation of the Oracle AI solution has yielded the following significant business value for Industrial Scientific:
- Automated support operations: The solution achieved high levels of support ticket deflection by automatically handling routine inquiries. By the publishing of this blog post, SensAI responded to over 2,230 emails, resulting in a time saving of over 185 hours. This automation has freed support personnel from basic email responses, allowing them to focus their expertise on complex technical issues that require human intervention.
- Improved customer experience: Response times have been dramatically reduced from days to minutes, delivering consistent and accurate responses with relevant documentation references. The system provides personalized service based on customer contract levels, helping ensure appropriate handling of replacement parts and shipping options.
- Increased operational efficiency: By streamlining the support workflow through intelligent automation, a 30% efficiency gain using SensAI, as shown in Figure 3, has significantly reduced operational costs through ticket deflection. Support resources are now optimally allocated, eliminating the need to consult multiple departments for routine answers and enabling staff to focus on high-value activities.
Figure 3: The SensAI solution provides a 30% efficiency gain over the manual process.
- Enhanced decision-making: The AI system generates valuable insights into common support issues and customer inquiry patterns, enabling data-driven improvements to support processes and documentation. This analytical capability has helped identify areas for process optimization and guided strategic improvements in customer support delivery.
Industrial Scientific’s adoption of Oracle AI demonstrates the power of technology to transform customer support operations. By using advanced AI capabilities and a robust cloud infrastructure, the company has achieved significant improvements in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance. This success story highlights the potential of AI to revolutionize industries and drive innovation, while showing the importance of choosing the right technology partner and solution architecture for enterprise-grade implementations.
“The insights we’re gaining from this system aren’t just solving today’s support tickets,” says Phanidhar. “They're helping us improve our documentation and build better training materials for tomorrow.”
Next steps
Building on this success, Industrial Scientific is exploring several exciting developments, including implementing chatbot support to enhance training for support personnel, using generative AI to create comprehensive training materials based on existing documentation, and potential integration with Oracle APEX to replace more expensive chat agent solutions.
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