Door-to-Door canvassing has always been a challenge. People on the field tend to knock doors of already existing customers along with the same door getting knocked by multiple canvassers of the same company. This results in significant time and productivity loss for companies, followed by un-satisfied and annoyed prospective customers. The Canvasser app offers a radical and simple solution to these problems.
Let us say Tom is a Canvasser who is registering a lead for the Smith’s who are interested in buying what Tom is there to sell. When Tom knocks on Smith’s residence and gets the lead, he quickly with one click pins Smith’s home location on a map using his Salesforce1 application.
Another canvasser Carrie after a few weeks is standing in front of Smith’s home and is considering knocking the door. She is unaware that Tom already registered Smith as a lead in the system, but how is she supposed to find this out without performing an exhaustive search on all leads and accounts and how possible is it to carry out such an exhaustive search from the field? It is for Carrie’s convenience that the Canvasser application is built. Having the Canvasser application available at her disposal as part of the Salesforce1 application installation, Carrie is able to stand in front of Smith’s home and using GPS on her phone is able to quickly check if the Smith's are registered in the system and if so she can instantly view all the lead and account details of the Smith's. This is smart as Carrier is never firing a search query, but just opening her Canvas and it finds out where currently she is and marks out the leads within 0.1 mile of her current location, thus covering Smith's home which gets marked out as a lead.
Behind the scenes: When Tom registered the lead and pinned it on a map, the entry got submitted to a custom object that retains an association between lead, account and their geographic location. When Carrie queries to check if Smith is registered, she essentially sends her location to Salesforce and Salesforce responds back with all leads/accounts within 0.1 mile radius of her current position. The application does not just provide the data, but also marks the data on the map. In this way now Carrie immediately knows that the house she is standing in front of is already a lead and is managed by Tom, so she does not knock Smith’s door. An instant convenience is provided for Carrier to jump from the map to the Lead/Account to view all activity details of the Lead/Account, this allowing Carrier to view the complete activity history of Smith's and then decide whether she wants to go ahead with knocking the door or not.
The location tracking is centralised between Lead and Account, thus making all activities of the specified Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity identifiable from a central location repository. This is very important as when leads get converted or opportunities are created for any account, the location information automatically maps to the new opportunities, events and tasks, thus giving tremendous usability convenience to the user.
What is important to know is that Carrier was even unaware of the house owners name to start with, and even more unaware that Smith’s home could already be a lead, but now with the Canvasser application she can easily find this out and prevent un-necessary knocks on doors and if she decides to know she can make a well informed know by knowing the complete account history of the Smith's
The Canvasser application is a one of a kind unique solution, where lead information is fetched by Geo-Location rather than fetching Geo-Location by Lead/Account. The only application to the best of our knowledge out there to pickup customer information by users current geo-position.
The functionality of the Canvasser application was not possible to achieve before Salesforce went mobile and with its integration into the Salesforce1 application, it is very convenient for canvassers to use and a tremendous value additional to any businesses who engage in door-to-door marketing.
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