About the client
Market Force helps businesses measure and improve their customer’s experience through mystery shopping, CSAT surveys, contact center data, and more. They operate a multinational workforce for mystery shopping and store audits.
Problem / Opportunity
The workforce’s only interface was one legacy website with no mobile support. This made the data collection unreliable, affected data quality and reduced Market Force’s ability to onboard new shoppers.
To bring the necessary work tools to the shopper force’s fingertips, we suggested building location aware mobile apps for all major platforms. This would enable shoppers to do their tasks right there on the spot. It would be easier for the workers to collect more data, quicker and more accurately while having to rely less on memory or hand written notes.
Key Achievements
- Replaced legacy website with location aware mobile offering
- Provided next generation analytics to find hidden drivers of CSAT
- Delivered consolidated single api over fragmented regional business logic.
- Initiated Test and Learn approach to iterative product development
Innovation Team
We built an innovation task force around their CTO, Sales Director, Head of the Shopper Force and internal IT from both US and UK platform teams. We added designers, product specialists, senior mobile architects and innovations facilitators.
We proceeded to build the prototype shopper apps for iOS and Android first. We developed the apps in feedback driven iterations with weekly releases. We committed to a staged rollout and released the MVP to the market, expanding its functionality and streamlining the UX over time with the explicit aim of getting real market feedback as early as possible.
Tech
We built an abstraction API on top of various legacy APIs. This API exposes a fully authenticated, Swagger documented JSON REST API which provides a coherent view of all business functions. The API is consumed by the location aware mobile apps we built for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Desktop using the Xamarin platform. With Xamarin we could create fully native apps, crucial in terms of performance, while sharing code across all platforms and the API. Abstraction and code reuse enable low maintenance costs and keep business logic confined in a central code repository, not distributed over various platform specific code bases.
Impact
With these apps, Market Force shoppers are now able to complete reports and audits right on location in the store. They accept on average 50% more jobs, are three times as likely to complete an assigned job and requests for clarification by the data quality team have gone down by 75%.
Today the four Market Force apps have become the go-to tool for the shopper force. We continuously deliver improvements to them and observe a business-critical SLA.