Field Marketing

Case Study

“We looked very carefully at a number of options before deciding on Call Collect. I have to say that I am delighted with the way the project has developed. Mobile data is very important to us, Call Collect has significantly improved our productivity and the ability to download and run it, without fuss, was critical to our decision to deploy it”
                               Duncan Miller – IT Director, Headcount .

The Company
Headcount is the second largest field marketing company in the UK. It specialises in services such as auditing, data collection, merchandising, sampling and promotion support, particularly in the retail sector. Headcount has effective and friendly working relationships with retail store managers up and down the UK. This helps to ensure their clients enjoy maximum exposure for their products or services.

The Challenge
One of Headcount’s most important retail clients, a household name in the FMCG sector, tasked the company to find a solution that would enable eighty of their field staff to visit their UK outlets and interview store managers to capture sales and stock information quickly. The key challenges were to find a solution that was quick and easy to use; capable of being carried out easily outside the office; and would allow field staff to use one simple standard form for the wide range of retail outlets visited. It was clear to Headcount that the best way to meet their client’s needs was to find a mobile solution that would maximise the efficiency of their field teams, but was easy to deploy. After assessing a range of vendors and solutions, Headcount found Call Collect was the perfect fit for their business.

The Solution
Call Collect works by allowing users to enter key field data into the appropriate fields and then transmit the information back to a via a GPRS/3G connection. This key feature allows Headcount employees to fill in e-forms quickly and efficiently when outside the office and in turn, be more responsive to clients. It also enabled office staff and management to process information provided by the mobile teams more quickly and efficiently, cutting administration time and human error. Headcount also provided their field staff with state of the art PDA devices on which they ran Call Collect. The PDA-style devices are capable of handling large amounts of data, so were the ideal tools to meet Headcount’s need to create e-forms for over 3,000 retail outlets.

The Benefits

• Staff found the ease-of-use offered by Call Collect made deploying mobile teams, and more crucially, updating information in real-time, a much quicker and simpler task to carry out.
• Stock levels and availability may be automatically deployed to field sales staff.
• Data inputting is no longer required at head office saving a vast amount of man hours.
• Data accuracy and productivity greatly improved and the overall process of inputting data outside the office has been simplified.
• Employees can now wrap up one job and get straight on to the next without having to come back in to the office.
• Real–time reporting enabled stock allocation to be more cost-effective and efficient, whilst sales data could be analysed more quickly.
• Call Collect’s automated e-form error checking greatly increases the correctness and completeness of data collected in the field.
• Training requirements are minimised due to the simple to use software interface.
• Data collection e-forms may be created easily and quickly. This means no expensive bespoke development costs when new data needs to be collected.