This is a guest post by Zishaan Hayath, co-founder and CEO of Toppr— an education company on a mission to personalize learning using technology. Find this post on the Toppr blog too.
When you are a startup and resources are scarce your productivity principle sounds something like this:
“Everything that helps you live — do more of it. Anything that you can skip — never do it.”
Three months ago we piloted with a sales team that conducted home demos for our students. The pilot was well received . We increased the team size and rolled out an Android app to help the team manage their workflow for customer visits.
However we had difficulty keeping track of the team’s movement during the day. The “where are you?” phone calls to our team members were annoying. Add to that our customers could not predict when we’d show up unless we called them. We knew tech could allow us to get real time location and status updates. But we had no expertise (nor time) to build such a location tracking application.
That’s when we discovered HyperTrack’s tracking-as-a-service. It looked like the perfect productivity tool . It helped us do more of what we wanted to do without having to write complex and unnecessary code that wasn’t core to us.
We signed up for the private Beta program. Integrating the API with our sales app was easy and fast. Three HyperTrack features made an immediate impact for us:
1. Live location of our sales team
Without writing additional code beyond the integration we could now see our entire sales team live on a map (no more “where are you?” phone calls!). Supervisors managing the teams could track status updates in real-time respond to delayed trips instantly and reassign trips to the nearest available agent.
2. Sending an ETA link to customers
Our customers have tight schedules. Office and school timings restrict the time window when we can meet them. Assuring the customer that we are on our way reduces the chances of rescheduling. With a single click on our sales app our team can now SMS a link to our customers with their location and an ETA. Our customers can view the link in a mobile browser and track us head towards them.
3. Ranking of agents by on-time and number of visits
We can now rank our team by their on-time visits and number of visits. We can now track and reward on-time performance. It’s also easy to debug the delayed and rescheduled cases and find fixes. This is having a big impact on our productivity and sales.
In the future we plan to use the fleet feature as we launch teams in newer cities. Any enterprise which has a mobile sales team should explore the benefits of HyperTrack.
