‘Field force apps ride smartphone wave to drive sales’

Native mobile applications could well disrupt the way sales-oriented companies – FMCG, consumer durables, BFSI or pharma – do business in future.

BeatRoute is one such application facilitating intelligent field execution. BeatRoute Innovations, a start-up, was set up in 2016 by IIT grads Vinay Singh and Angad Kikla.

Patronised by brands such as Pepsico, Danone, Perfetti and Gionee, BeatRoute prides itself as a product ‘invented and designed in India’ in true ‘Make in India’ spirits.

Vinay Singh, Co-founder, BeatRoute Innovations, spoke to BusinessLine on what the future holds for customer interface, service, delivery and innovation.

Does the smartphone represent the ultimate miniaturised form of field service? Or, would it shrink further...?

Device innovations will continue to happen. What defines the trend is how innovators will use new kind of popular devices as their solution for complex business problems.

I do believe though smartphone is a very powerful mix of technology elements to be a lasting solution for running field force applications in service, order or delivery scenarios.

...which brings us to wearable technology. Are you game?

I think we are just at the beginning of the wearable devices revolution. A lot is yet to happen. Solution providers are still trying to understand various applications. While health bands have taken a lead, days when we will monitor our health parameters live is not far away.

With application of AI is becoming common, there is going to be further revelation as to how, for instance, a smart watch can guide a person as an intelligent and functioning assistant.

We ourselves vision that a regional sales head will speak into a smartwatch asking ‘Hey BeatRoute, could you send me a summary of customers, who are showing low sales trend in Lucknow’ before he takes a flight to Lucknow.

The mobile nature of business is said to make cloud the ideal foil for field force management..

Cloud is no more merely a choice between ‘on-premise servers’ v/s ‘hosted server’ or a choice between ‘capital expenditure’ v/s ‘opex expense.’ Cloud today means valuable service.

As a product-centric company, we cannot imagine how we will be able deliver innovative solutions to customers without using Google’s or Microsoft’s machine learning platform or Google’s MAP services.

Field professionals must have entire customer history with a company, not just service records. How does your app help here?

Our goal is to make the customer interaction in service, delivery and order scenarios 10 times more effective. We designed our field force mobile application to give a 360 degree view of the customer engagement.

When a field representative looks at a customer in the BeatRoute app, he gets to see what other relevant teams have done with respect to that customer than just his own function.

An example of this is sales manager of our customer Gionee being able to see what has been delivered to a neighbourhood store or what is a visual merchandising feedback from the in-store product promoter apart from sales trend.

Does the app respond to signals sent by intelligent devices (IoT) and help customers understand what their own equipment is saying?

We provide APIs (application programme interface) to plug in IoT-based data into the BeatRoute platform.

We are working with one of our customers in frozen food industry to capture temperature of their freezers that are deployed at thousands of stores.

What are the additional contextual data generated that makes the process more intelligent and employee more efficient?

Location awareness, neighbourhood sales insight, profiling point-of-sales with merchandising pictures captured, and driving time taken to complete a day’s beat, are some of the information that is used to make sales representatives more efficient.

How do clients benefit from the ‘capture of customer’s voice’ (image, audio and video)?

We use image captured at point-of-sales to grade visual merchandising execution quality and protect customers investment in POS marketing. Image capturing of business customers is also part of our smart profiling mechanism.

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