Case Studies

Sirocco selects TouchPoint - Mobile Survey

Sirocco is a joint venture between Emirates and Heineken International which manages the sales and marketing of a range of premium global beverages in the Middle East. It handles top brands such as Heineken, Amstel Light, Budweiser, Tiger, Carling and Sol, and - following Heineken's acquisition of Scottish & Newcastle - Bulmers and Strongbow were added to the portfolio.

Scenario

Sirocco was looking for a method of enhancing its methods to survey and assess hotels and outlets to gather product availability and visibility data. It was also looking for ways in which to better address the needs of task management and details management for accounts and outlets. Existing paper based data collection methods were proving ineffective and required manual coding and entry prior to deriving any observations or understanding from the data.

Solution

Sirocco contracted Unique Computer Systems to develop a handheld solution to assist in collection of data in real-time from accounts and outlets. The solution was also required to help in contact and task management for key account managers (KAMs). Daily activities and tasks for KAMs were needed to be made available to them to assist them in timely completion and Unique Computer Systems modeled the application on its TouchPoint Mobile Survey application, which allows for creation, management and completion of custom surveys.

TouchPoint is a complete three-tier system with a) a complete server hosted administrative interface to create and manage survey questionnaire, b) a flexible database for maintaining all survey records, a data synchronization module for uploading survey data to the server and downloading updated questionnaires to the handheld devices and c) a simple interactive handheld based user interface to capture customer responses. Administrators can easily create and manage different survey questionnaires and deploy them to the handheld using Over-the-Air (OTA) provisioning.

Survey personnel can capture customer responses along with specific statistical customer information and transfer it to the enterprise system using GPRS or Wi-Fi based synchronization. To address requirements for task and activity management, UCS created a route planning extension to TouchPoint and a Contact and Task manager which gave KAMs the ability to plan their visits to accounts and outlets and associate tasks with each of the visits.

Supervisors would also be able to assign tasks to KAM, thus providing business direction. As KAMs completed visits and surveys at outlets, data for these was stored on the handheld computers and was transferred to the server on the next synchronization. This data was used for management reporting and also sent to a analysis and reporting tool for extended reporting and business metrics.

Results

Using the TouchPoint solution as a base model for the final solution enabled supervisors to build their own surveys and quickly modify existing surveys to help in assessing outlet data. Tasks could also be quickly assigned and completed in a few clicks by the KAMs. In addition, KAMs were also now had the ability to enter reminder tasks for themselves for future account visits. Though choice of device limited the ergonomic functionality of the solution, assistance was given to help in modifying reporting to generate the most value possible from the data collected.