The goal - Automate remote sales teams
To make sure that the Hisense brand is represented in the best way possible at the point of sale, Hisense manages an extensive field team that is responsible for maximizing sales in retail stores all over South Africa. Field team agents are responsibly for taking stock of Hisense products; photographing promotional materials and stands in stores; taking note of service requests; ensuring the correct merchandising of products and getting feedback from store managers.
This required Hisense field agents to collect large amounts of data from all over South Africa, including thousands of photographs. It was a daunting task to sort through all of the data that was received on any given day. The data management process usually involved trying to sort through dozens of photos after the reps returned from a day in the field, trying to figure out where photos were taken and by whom. In addition, the data collected was unstructured and difficult to sort, filter and search. Lastly, the constant copying, emailing and collation of data created the potential for human error.
Hisense needed a system that would automate all of the data collection activities, organize the reps and save them time and money by eliminating unnecessary processes.
The solution - An automated merchandising and data collection system
To solve these problems Hisense introduced Onsight, a sales team management solution that allows Hisense managers to schedule data collection activities for individual reps and watch as data is uploaded to the Onsight servers in real time. Managers can configure new data collection forms on the fly so that new data gathering tasks can be created, scheduled, and executed by field agents within a matter of minutes.
Each rep receives information on their duties for the day via the cloud. After a rep completes an activity, they send a confirmation to their manager via the app and managers can keep track of their activities. All data collected is structured so that it can be filtered, searched and organised to provide real time business insights.
Overall, the automation of data collection and merchandising activities has helped to save valuable time for Hisense. The long process that used to accompany sorting through data has been eliminated by creating a system that uploads everything sent from reps to a single, easily-accessible server. There is also no longer any uncertainty about which store a particular piece of data came from. According to Tiaan Esterhuyse, Retail Analyst for Hisense SA, “Onsight has provided us with a system with which we can now automate our data collection and merchandising process, and it has been a real time-saver. Our reps’ days are now more structured because all activities are organized through the app and our processes are more simplified.”
Hisense now has a field team equipped with a mobile solution that brings real world data from the retail channel back to the management team at head office in real time so that better business decisions can be made quicker.
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