DEPARTMENTS
Smart Devices
Sweepr the Smart Home
Concierge New Brand is Poised to Serve as a Behind-the-Scenes Monitoring Service to Maintain All Connected
Devices Automatically
By Jeremy Glowacki
Our homes are becoming more connected with
every year. The average home is predicted to have
50 connected devices by 2020. With more
connectivity comes increased complexity. The
average homeowner will need more support to
manage their home, and it can’t be all via call
centers. A new brand, called Sweepr, is poised to
serve as a behind-the-scenes monitoring service
to maintain all connected devices automatically.
Using machine learning and emotional
intelligence, Sweepr creates multiple personas for
users based on their knowledge and acts as the
technical concierge for the home, looking after
seen and unseen incidents on behalf of the
homeowner. It maintains an up-to-date store of
all device-related content to help homeowners
with any questions they might have about how a
device works, why it has stopped working, or
when the warranty expires, etc.
Sweepr is the latest development from cofounders
Jim Hannon and Alan Coleman, which
began in 2010, with their Dublin-based billing
software company Brite:Bill, which was used by
16 Residential Tech Today | July/August 2019
North American companies such as AT&T,
Comcast, and Sprint. In 2016, Brite:Bill was
acquired by the Israeli company AmDocs, as one
of three companies bought by the Nasdaq-listed
provider for approximately $260 million.
Coleman says his team, many of them from
Brite:Bill, are using their experience solving one
sort of customer service headache (billing) to
sort out another (technical support).
“It really requires a lot of agent intervention,” he
noted. “One North American ISP shared with me
that they still have 96 percent of their technical
support issues come in as phone calls to their care
agents. As a result, the economics are very
punitive and getting worse, because the variety of
issues that are driving tech support is getting
wider, and the frequency that people need help is
increasing as well with the complexity of our
homes.”
Sweepr will leverage the proliferation of voice
assistants in the home as well as connectivity
features embedded into household appliances
and smart home technologies.
“The goal is to have a single, ubiquitous support
layer to communicate with many different
products and services to provide help to
customers when they need it,” Coleman said.
“The reality of that situation is that it requires a
lot of collaboration and content to help deal with
the diversity of issues that arise. We don’t have all
of the answers to all of the tech support questions
in the world, and we don’t have the commercial
muscle, so to speak, to force all of the constituent
parties to cooperate and play nice. What we do
see is economic factors driving toward that
ubiquitous support layer.”
Coleman says that appliance and smart home
products companies are only beginning to
experience the financial challenges that internet
service providers have endured for years, while
servicing client calls. They’re also finding that it’s
incredibly difficult to support a connected
product without any relationship to the router or
network layer.
Sweepr looks to serve as the behind-the-scenes
service layer for your local ISP. The plan is for it
to play the technical concierge role as voiceenabled
Level 1 and Level 2 support for the
network and other connected devices in the
home.
“Our expectation is that a customer having a
technical issue would say ‘Hey Comcast, why isn’t
my Whirlpool fridge working?,’ and we’ll be able
to take the diagnostic information from the
device and then, based on content authored by
Whirlpool, we’ll give a Whirlpool-accredited
support solution that is facilitated by the ISP.”
That’s the plan, at least. Today, Sweepr is in a
trial with one North American ISP, delivering
their support – via Skills – without any
interconnectedness with other connected
products. They hope to launch in Q4.
Stay tuned. x
Using machine learning and emotional intelligence, Sweepr creates
multiple personas for users based on their knowledge and acts as the
technical concierge for the home, looking after seen and unseen
incidents on behalf of the homeowner.