We synced up with Partha Sarkar, Director of Software Development, to talk customer notifications, Net Promoter Score surveys, and a questionable stereotype about software developers.

Groundworks, Inc. is a Virgina Beach, Virginia-based firm that operates over one dozen basement and crawlspace repair brands across the United States, and has been a HyperTrack customer for just over one year. We checked in with Partha Sarkar, Director of Software Development.

Tell me about what you’ve built with HyperTrack.

Initially, we wanted to use HyperTrack to do “on my way” messaging when our sales reps, whom we call CFIs, are en route to the customer’s house. We send a link to a customer portal where they get to see their CFI’s picture, his bio, and a live map. The customer can look at their location and know how soon the CFI's going to arrive.

Then, when the CFI arrives inside the geofence, we trigger a secondary message, we call it the “arrived” message, so that the customer knows that the CFI’s right outside the door. Before the CFI even rings the bell, the customer goes to open the door.

Delivering the surveys to customers in real time greatly increased the survey response rate.

That was the initial reason, but now there are a lot of additional things. For example, HyperTrack is now tied into delivering our Net Promoter Score surveys. As soon as our CFIs leave the geofence, we send the customer an NPS in real time—based on the knowledge that HyperTrack gives us that they are done with their appointment. We have seen that delivering the surveys to customers in real time greatly increased the survey response rate.

Looking at the data, it has definitely resulted in more people versus when we were sending them out through emails. It’s made a big, big difference.

You’re also using HyperTrack for operations analysis.

Going all the way back to when I joined the company eight years ago—it wasn’t even called Groundworks yet and it was a very small company with 150 employees—we had used the same appointment length for CFIs. Everyone just assumed we knew how long an appointment would take and how many appointments to schedule in a day.

With HyperTrack, we can find out how much time CFIs spend inside the geofence, so we started collecting reporting on that. We wanted to know if the time spent is relational at all to the job being sold or not.

We’re still learning from it, but one of the things that’s very clear to us is that the CFIs didn’t need such long appointment blocks. And I think that’s a very big insight to know. We can actually schedule more appointments per day.

This also is going to be used to train our new CFIs. When we can analyze whether a job was sold and understand whether our guy spent enough time with the customer, then we can create better appointments. This is really valuable for our operations and sales.

What do folks think?

When I gave the initial training of On My Way to all of our sales managers and general managers, they were very happy—they were ecstatic. They could now understand: if a customer’s unhappy, well, why is he unhappy? Did our guy show up half an hour late? Or was he early to the job?

This is so far reaching and so impactful for the company that our president, Mike Irby, has a Monday meeting with all of the sales managers and he pulls up this report, every Monday.

The more insights you can get—instead of just going with that gut feeling—the more data you can get, analyze, and base your decisions on, the more successful you’ll be. Our company is very data driven.

Partha (far left) with some of the HyperTrack team at AWS re:Invent 2019

How did you get started with HyperTrack?

Google.

No kidding.

I was literally Googling. Yeah. I found HyperTrack as a very good solution for us. When I was looking at the API documentation, you seemed to have documented everything, and very well, and HyperTrack’s SDK was very simple to integrate. It went very fast. I remember telling my CMO, “I can have a PoC ready in a week.” And I did it.

It was ready in a week. It didn’t have all of the bells and whistles, but everything worked. You know, with HyperTrack, you just drop it in, you just invoke it, and it starts sending you these events with webhooks.

“I can have a POC ready in a week.” And I did it.

Not to put any ideas in your head, but if you had to use something else, if HyperTrack didn’t exist or we went away, what would you do?

Oh, no, no, no, no. (laughs). My job depends on it. Don’t you go away. (laughs)

We are in the phase where we want to re-factor some of our apps and build one app that has everything, and one of the very first features that we were talking about was how HyperTrack would be integrated. Right, so, um, you can’t go away. It would make my life very hard.

Do you have any advice for somebody starting a location tracking project?

I would definitely recommend HyperTrack. It’s super easy to integrate, there’s clear documentation, and, um... it’s cheap, which is a big deal to us. You know, developers are usually cheap.

Uh…

PS: It’s true though. Developers are cheap.