The Client
The client is an established family-owned business specialising in distributing cleaning, hygiene and janitorial products to the professional user across England, Scotland and Wales. The company offers quality brands backed by the highest standards of customer service.
Challenges
The client needed a mobile app to work across all the platforms and devices. Dealing with the site visits by CSR, they needed to update service visits or create electronic service sheets / Inspections etc. Each site has a visit every month by a CSR in which a number of different tasks need to be completed. All of the tasks needed to be in a step by step form that the CSR has to complete. Once the form has been completed the CSR needed to get a name and signature to confirm they have attended the site.
- A PDF version of the report needed to be automatically emailed to a distribution list for that site.
- The report needs to be traffic light graded.
- The PDF version needs to be accessible against an event logged in Salesforce and in the app for download.
- Limited access to different people using the app
Solution
We first analyzed the client's requirement and then started building the same app On cross platform i.e Telerik. Solution provided by Astrea are as follows:
- As the client wanted us to develop dynamic functionalities and features within a cross platform environment, Telerik was used for the development of the app
- As the report required to be traffic light graded. We implemented Green for all fine. Orange for issues found that had to be fixed. Red for pending action (the criteria to create the grade will be based on the answers to the form questions)
- All the data was accessible offline. So data sync occured when the device was back online.
- The users of the app were able to run reports on stock, visit information, open cases and activity reports and also download the reports from the app
- We created authority levels set up as to which users of the app can view which data. I.e. they will only have permission to view some account information within Salesforce
Result
We successfully built the Application using Telerik, having following benefits:
- The application incorporated dynamic and modern UI with the help of Salesforce.
- It allowed the capturing of signature with the help of touch or stylers - i.e. capturing an image on device and then upload that signature image to Salesforce.
- Follow-up Task creation and scheduling is easy together with the creation of service actions for new issues discovered while on-site and knowledge base searches if help is required.
- Customers can have access to their own online portal account via Salesforce Communities and can automatically be informed of any recommendations or non-conformances in real time to ensure there are never any surprises following a customer field service visit.
- Reports are created and are accessible for download or user can schedule the reports to be emailed on a frequent basis
