Why “We'll Get Back to You" Isn't Good Enough
The growing support gap in sports field technology
If you’re considering a field-marking robot, your first focus should be on the technology. The features the robot has. How user-friendly it is. How accurate it is. Its portability. Those are important considerations.
According to Bruce Romano, the Service and Support Team Lead for North America, the most important question when buying an autonomous line-marking robot is not about these features, as incredible as they might be. It comes down to one simple thing.
What happens when something goes wrong?
Because eventually, something will. Not because the technology is flawed. Because real life happens and humans are unpredictable.
A robot sits in storage over the winter without getting cleaned. A setting gets changed, or GPS conditions shift. A customer drops the tablet into a puddle. Whatever happens, we’ve heard it all.
Picture this. A local school in Gibson County, Tennessee, wanted to transform their football field into a practice field, but the settings on their tablet were not cooperating. The end zone was incorrectly placed outside the field, with part of it on concrete. Definitely not ideal for players running drills. One of our U.S. support team members spotted the issue and got the customer back on track–all in under 12 minutes. 12 minutes, and the customer went from complete panic stations to a perfect practice field. One of our Danish team members repaired and fully serviced 86 robots in just under four months.
It sounds simple, right? Except it’s not. These folks not only need to know every aspect of how our robots work (both hardware and software), but also need to stay cool and collected, even with the most irate customers. And they are there 24 hours a day, six days a week.
Our philosophy at TinyMobileRobots is that support is an integral part of the product experience.
Bruce said, "A great support experience means the customer ends the interaction feeling heard and more confident than when they started. Not just that their problem got solved, but that they understand what happened and know what to do if it comes up again."
That philosophy is how the team operates.
The New Face(s) of Support
For example, the support team at TinyMobileRobits can resolve 86% of customer issues remotely. GPS problems, calibration questions, connectivity issues, paint flow concerns, and even some hardware issues can often be diagnosed and resolved remotely. That means customers avoid costly downtime and still ensure their fields are ready for game day.
At TinyMobileRobots, our support isn't outsourced, and we don’t use a chatbot. Your ticket won’t disappear into the ether. In fact, most issues get fixed within 24 hours after first contact.
Bruce explained, "What surprises new customers most is that they can actually get a real person who knows the product. Not a ticket queue. Not a chatbot. Someone live, who can look at their specific robot and walk them through a fix in real time."
That is crucial during the busiest moments of the sports season. According to Bruce, the start of football season triggers the biggest uptick for support requests. Tournament weekends and school opening weeks aren't far behind.
That’s when our customers have no room for error, because they’re under the gun. "Our job during those windows is to be fast and calm. Customers are already under pressure. If we can take the robot problem off their plate in an hour instead of a day, that's real value."
The Future of Service at TinyMobileRobots
Support is evolving quickly. Recently, we introduced Krisp AI to streamline support calls, improve documentation, and translate the customer’s preferred native language in real time. Here's the important distinction. AI isn't replacing anyone on our team, but it is helping our team provide better service. This means that they can spend more time focusing on customers (and less on taking notes).
Bruce predicts a more proactive support team. "I'd like to move toward a model where the system flags potential issues before they become a problem, and we're reaching out to the customer rather than waiting for a support ticket."
That's the future of support. It’s more than answering calls and checking a box. It’s about the customer feeling heard. It’s about white-glove service with a support team that knows the product inside and out. It’s about having professional-looking fields ready for game day, with the least amount of stress on the folks in the trenches, who make sure that they always are.
Our customers aren't just buying a robot. They're investing in their operation.
The technology behind our robots is fantastic, and we’re proud of what we’ve built. But Murphy’s Law still exists. Things will go wrong, and it’s never convenient. When game day is approaching, and the paint line gets clogged, our customers can rest easy because they know someone will pick up the phone and walk them through how to fix it.
Bruce sums it up, "We treat your uptime like it's our responsibility, because it is."
