Inspiration
I was an early employee in an energy utility & broadband company mainly operating in the consumer market. The company got acquired in 2017 for +$15 million. Telemarketing and field marketing has been our primary sales channels - and alongside with innovative products been the pillars for our growth. However, we haven't able to find a software solution that makes it easy to manage our field marketing and telemarketing staff. Even though we have tried a lot of different vendors.
Most vendors build their software to support inside sales teams that sell to SMB's + enterprises. The sales strategy on these market is totally different from the consumer market - and so are our needs for the software. There are few players that have built software for handling a field marketing and telemarketing sales force targetting the consumer market. The problem is with these players' software still doesn't support our needs.
We haven't been the only ones that have experienced this problem. My teammates (business people not involved in the hackathon) have started an association for companies in Denmark that uses field marketing and telemarketing heavily as part of their marketing. Some of the biggest energy utilities, alarm companies and telecom companies in Denmark are members. The companies in the association also say they have the same problem.
So I've built a system to efficiently handle a companies field marketing and telemarketing sales agents. The application has been in production before the hackathon as a web app. I've built a mobile app for the system during the hackathon, which the field marketing sales agents are going to use.
What it does
The app makes it possible for field marketing sales agents to sign up customers. The process is simple, first, they put in some basic information about the customer (including Denmark's equivalent of a social security number). The system then automatically pulls relevant data from government databases. After that is done, the sales agent confirms the data, takes a picture of the physical contract - and makes a recording where he/she says some required closing remarks. When that's done, the agent clicks next - and the customer receives a text, which the customer will have to reply to.
The sales leader can follow his sales agents on the fly. So even though his sales agents are spread out across cities or countries, he can follow the performance of his agents in real-time. The dashboard/reporting was built before the hackathon - and is part of the web app.
How I built it
The backend is built in the framework Laravel (PHP) and the app is built in React Native.
Challenges I ran into
Handling media was the biggest challenges. Another big challenge was integrating JWT-authentication into the backend.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The App actually works!
What I learned
A lot about navigation in React Native, persistent state management, JWT-authentication and handling media.
What's next for Ego
I'll build some more stuff into it - and maybe we're going to sell the system as a SAAS product to other companies. We've already gotten a lot of interest. However, we have decided to wait until we've made a few changes that our current users have requested.
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