Spiritzone is an online multi-outlet liquor store chain in India and the first one to go digital for home deliveries of liquor in the State of Maharashtra. They use HyperTrack to give live order tracking experience to their customers. This is an interview with their CTO, Pragya Jaiswal.
Leigh: We're going to start off with an easy question here. And that is, what is your name? What's your title? And what's the name of your company?
Pragya: I am Pragya Jaiswal, I am the CTO of Spiritzone which is an online liquor delivery platform based in India.
Leigh: Perfect, thank you. If you have to say what your company does, a short description, what would you say?
Pragya: Spiritzone is an online liquor delivery platform that gets your favorite liquor to your doorstep.
Leigh: What kinds of problems or issues were you facing, before you started using HyperTrack?
Pragya: We started as a pandemic baby! Our company was launched during the pandemic and as you can understand the nature of the product is such that people want it immediately. Liquor is something that is an impulse buy. People always want it within 5 minutes if that's possible and they like keeping a track of where their order has reached especially in India.
We were actively looking for a solution to give a live order tracking experience to our customers. Setting that up was a huge challenge for us because we felt pretty confident that we would be able to do it without the support of any 3rd party vendor but we failed. It is a very challenging task to get rid of all the noise the GPS data typically entails and always keep a server live to capture location coordinates, which is pretty high-frequency data. Those are some typical challenges that we faced before we came across HyperTrack.
Leigh: Right, I understand. Thank you for that. So how were these issues affecting your company's performance or your KPIs before you started using HyperTrack?
Pragya: Customers used to keep calling our customer service center asking, 'hey, where's my order?' They needed that kind of visibility into delivery agents and their locations. It impacted our customer service as our service agents weren't able to give them a satisfactory answer. It would cause a lot of delays in getting back to customers with responses because they would have to call up delivery agents and ask them 'hey where are you?' They didn't have that visibility either. It hit our customer service, which is one of the main things that a customer looks for in an online platform. It was pretty frustrating to know that there was such a huge latency involved in coming back to customers with an accurate answer of where the delivery agent was at that point in time.
Leigh: What was the breaking point? What was the moment where you said enough's enough, we need to find a solution?
Pragya: We did have a live tracking experience that we try to build on our own, but that was so bad that the customers really weren't willing to rely on it. It was pretty annoying for anyone in tech to give that experience to his or her end users. I remember I placed an order just to test out how the live tracking experience was on our app and, to be honest, I didn't see any delivery agent moving on the map and that was it. I thought that it's time to find a better solution and because it's not great to have, you know mediocre solutions like this being offered to end customers.
Leigh: Right, I understand. Tell us a little bit about finding HyperTrack what what was it like when you found them?
Pragya: My CEO came to me with HyperTrack as a suggestion and asked me if I could explore it given it was a bit of an issue having a bad live tracking experience. Even the CEO was aware of that. I went ahead and set up a call with the HyperTrack team and they were pretty quick at getting back with a full-scale solution on how we could implement better tracking for our customers as well as for our internal teams. Yeah, that's how I came across HyperTrack.
Leigh: Great. What do you feel sets HyperTrack apart from other companies like it?
Pragya: HyperTrack is super easy to integrate. I was personally looking at the entire project, and at all the APIs that they had given us access to and one thing that I noticed was it was really easy for any mobile developer to set up HyperTrack and get going in a day's time. Obviously, it wouldn't be as perfect of an app without proper API integrations, but you can be up and running and you can have live location updates in a day's time.
Leigh: Great, thank you. In your own words, how would you describe HyperTrack in one short sentence?
Pragya: HyperTrack is a really intelligent, location-based platform, and they're constantly evolving and trying to come up with better ways of making location tracking easy. There's something called geofences that they've recently come up with, and I think that's a very valuable solution for anyone in the logistics industry.
Leigh: Thanks. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you and your team are using HyperTrack?
Pragya: So my team and I are extremely reliant on HyperTrack and what it has to offer as a platform. Our delivery agents use delivery apps that are entirely driven by HyperTrack. The location updates go out to HyperTrack and from there our internal teams track where these agents are and if they're not on their way to deliver an order it gives us very quick action time to catch hold of the delivery guys and ask them why there's a delay in the order. Also, our customers are way happier now and that's a huge relief for us because they're exactly able to see where the agent has reached and it makes me so happy to have a modern-day live tracking experience for customers of our app.
Leigh: What do you like best about HyperTrack?
Pragya: My favorite thing about HyperTrack is their documentation is great, so you know anyone who understands how to build a mobile app can actually go look at the documentation and set up the API instantly. You don't even need to reach out to the team If you just want to do a trial. You can go, you can sign up and immediately you get a set of keys that you can use to integrate with your mobile app, and yeah, you're up and running, If you want a longer-term solution you obviously have to get in touch with the team and work out a plan that works best for you.
Leigh: Is there anything that doesn't quite work for you or you'd like to see improved?
Pragya: The only thing that I would like to see being improved is how the webhooks are implemented? I would like to have some sort of filter for different types of events. What else. Let me just think about that a little bit. Yeah, I don't have any another thing and that tells you that this is a great testimony. I have nothing negative to say about HyperTrack.
Leigh: So how do you and your team feel after you started using HyperTrack? How did it feel overall for your team?
Pragya: HyperTrack has a great support team and they're very quick at responding to problems that our development team faces and they really like to help you fix your issues and they follow up as well. So that's great. We feel relieved that we now have a platform that supports us in every way. We have much better tracking than we could have imagined with our previous solution prior to finding HyperTrack. We have every kind of visibility that we need. We have shorter response times when we talk about customer service. Also, customers feel really happy with this kind of tracking and our calls to customer care have gone down. They've gone down significantly, so very happy about that. We've seen improved customer satisfaction because, you know, since it's liquor, customers want to know where their order has reached, whether it's at their doorstep, or whether it's 2 kilometers away. So we've definitely seen a reduced number of calls to our customer service centers. And we've also been able to get a better hold of where our delivery agents are at a given point in time. So yeah, it gives us more control over our entire operations.
Leigh: Great awesome. What features are you benefiting the most from and why? If you can just go through one or two of the features that you feel are most useful for you and your team?
Pragya: We are benefiting a lot from the nearby API now. The nearby API is something that I really wanted to have in terms of getting to know which agent is near a particular location so that he can come and pick up an order and then go out and deliver it. Knowing that involves some sort of, complex mathematical calculations that happen in the back end and we didn't want to take the overhead of calculating all of that because it's complex, right? So I'm glad that HyperTrack does that for us, and it helps us get our assignments in place so we're able to assign orders faster to delivery agents.
Leigh: Do you feel that the original problem that you are facing is solved or is on the way to being solved?
Pragya: Ever since we implemented HyperTrack we have created this sort of incentive and penalty system for our delivery agents which helps us to get orders out faster. Now our penalties are involved around getting orders delivered within the stipulated time or the time that we commit the customer. So basically, whenever we deliver an order on time, that's a huge plus for us. The customer is happy as well as the delivery agent is getting his incentive. Keeps both of our partners really, really happy that way. Also, we've noticed that customers have certain complaints like 'hey, you did not deliver my order to my doorstep.' We have visibility over that now so we know exactly where the delivery agent has left the order whether it's at the gate of the building or whether it's a mile away from the actual delivery spot. So we have that information now and we feel a bit more in control. And yeah, that's great.
Leigh: So the last question here is would you recommend HyperTrack and if so why?
Pragya: HyperTrack has definitely helped us overcome all those issues related to location intelligence and you know live order tracking, having transparency related to where delivery agents are. HyperTrack has helped us get there. So yeah, I would definitely recommend HyperTrack to anyone who is looking to be up and running in the market with a really awesome logistics-based solution and tracking. Plus HyperTrack is always there to give you best practices and always support you to get up and running in no time. HyperTrack is great!
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