Skip to content
All case studies Service Business

Knowledge assistant for a field-service company

A field-service company gave 80 technicians a grounded, citation-backed assistant — and freed senior staff from a third of their day spent answering repeat questions.

Representative engagement — the figures below model a typical project of this kind, not a named-client audited result.

SectorField service & equipment maintenance
Scale~1,200 manuals, SOPs & bulletins
Team~80 field technicians
Engagement~9 weeks, audit to handover
The challenge

The manual was a phone call to someone senior

On site, technicians either phoned a senior colleague or dug through PDF manuals to answer procedural questions. Around 30% of senior-staff time went to fielding the same questions over and over.

Answers were inconsistent, and new hires took about five months to reach full productivity because so much knowledge lived in people's heads.

What we built

A grounded assistant that cites its source — or says ask a supervisor

We built a retrieval pipeline over the company's 1,200-document corpus and a grounded assistant, accessible on mobile, that answers procedural questions with a citation to the exact source passage.

We graded it against an evaluation set of around 300 real questions. When an answer falls below the grounding threshold, the assistant says to ask a supervisor rather than guessing.

  • Retrieval pipeline over ~1,200 manuals, SOPs, and bulletins
  • A grounded, mobile-accessible assistant with source citations
  • A ~300-question evaluation set scoring grounding and accuracy
  • A safe fallback when confidence is low
The figures

What changed, by the numbers.

94%Grounded-answer accuracy on the evaluation set
~9%Senior-staff time on repeat questions (was ~30%)
~40 secMedian time to find a procedure (was ~12 min)
~3 moNew-hire ramp to full productivity (was ~5 mo)

Time to find a procedure

Before
~12 min
After
~40 sec

Senior-staff time on repeat Qs

Before
~30%
After
~9%
The outcome

Knowledge that travels with every technician

Technicians get a grounded, cited answer in seconds instead of a phone call, and senior staff got most of their day back. Because every answer points to its source and low-confidence questions route to a person, the assistant is trusted on real jobs — and new hires get up to speed noticeably faster.

Have a process like this one?

Get in touch hello@fivela.net