Spectra Precision
How a laser manufacturer gave field customers an always-on, bilingual support technician — without adding headcount or pulling experts off the hard cases
Spectra Precision manufactures construction and survey lasers that field crews rely on every day. When something goes wrong on a job site, the call to support is rarely about something rare — a receiver that won't pair, a battery indicator, an error code, a calibration question, the wrong accessory.
The answers already exist — every active model, and nearly every discontinued one, has a Spectra-written user guide. But a crew on a job site doesn't have ten minutes to find, download, and read a PDF, and Spectra's support team shouldn't spend most of their day re-answering questions already sitting in manuals they wrote themselves. The goal was never to deflect customers away from humans — it was to free those humans for the cases that actually need them.
We built Andy — a support agent that reads, answers from, and is strictly bounded by Spectra's own documentation, and nothing else. Andy doesn't browse the web, and he doesn't speculate; when he doesn't know, he says so and hands off to a human.
His conversational rules came from Spectra's own support philosophy, not a generic AI playbook: accuracy over cleverness, conversational tone over form-like exchanges, and dead-simple deployment — one line of code on any Spectra page, no login, no app. Andy answers in English and Spanish, with every Spectra product manual memorized.
Andy improved by being used. Real conversations surfaced new failure patterns each week, and each pattern became a permanent rule.
More than a dozen troubleshooting-discipline rules now guard against the mistakes that plague generic chatbots — no recommending self-calibration, no assuming which accessory a customer has, no repeating an instruction a customer already pushed back on, and an automatic handoff the moment a broken link is reported.
Every thumbs-down got a transcript review; every pattern became a rule. That loop — review, diagnose, ship — is Andy's main engine of improvement. Under the hood, two model versions run side by side in production, so speed-versus-quality decisions are backed by real user data, not vendor claims.
Over four months in production, Andy handled 371 conversations across more than 1,500 messages — nearly five exchanges per session on average.
The questions cluster exactly where you'd expect: battery, calibration, pairing, product selection — the high-volume, repeatable issues that bottleneck every hardware support team.
Roughly seventy percent resolved without a human ever joining — more than 250 cases recovered back to the team for work that actually needs them. The thirty percent that do hand off arrive with context already gathered and the easy explanations already ruled out, giving the human technician a running start.
Andy, our support chatbot, has taken the long tail of our most repetitive product questions off the support team's desk, answering them around the clock and in two languages. Just as importantly, Blue Fractal has been a caring partner throughout — chasing down every issue we surfaced and turning each one into a sharper, more reliable agent.Luca Pugina — Product Management Director, Spectra Precision