A salespeople portal for a Nordic telecom company

Client challenge

Simplify the sales processes via digital services.

Technologies

Java, Spring Boot, React, TypeScript, Microservices

Solution at a glance

A web-based application used in the telco shops that consolidates, automates, and simplifies the sales process by providing a full overview of products and services that the customer owns and building specific offers and campaigns based on that data, including address-specific broadband technologies and IPTV services.   

In addition, a tool for salespeople to track their previous orders and automatically save what interactions they had with the customer to help other salespeople see who and how has helped the customer previously leading to a unified customer experience.

Complicated sales processes and tools required streamlining

Our client is a top Nordic telecom that provides a large variety of services to an extensive customer base from consumers to large businesses.  

There were many outdated and complex tools to provide these services to the consumer customers, which made the in-store sales process cumbersome and slow. Small companies often don’t have a need for business products and prefer to use consumer offerings. There was no simple way to offer consumer services to small businesses. 

The first goal was to speed sales flows and make them easier. The salespeople used several different systems for selling services. Each system had a steep learning curve and sometimes even required use of a pen and paper. Sales agents also had to remember several different sets of business rules.  

The second goal was to offer a variety of automated customer- and sales agent-specific offers and campaigns. This was difficult to do manually, since information about a customer’s eligibility had to be gathered from a variety of data sources. 

The third goal was to free salespeople from tedious manual work that could be automated.  

The solution was to build a web-based application used in the telco shops that consolidates, automates, digitalizes, and simplifies the sales process by providing a full overview of products and services that the customer owns.  It could also build specific offers and campaigns based on that data, including address-specific broadband technologies and IPTV services.   

A web-based app to sell all the telco’s offerings from one place 

Proekspert was trusted to build a web-based application that gathered all different offerings into a single page. Address-specific broadband technologies and IPTV services had to be provisioned differently from mobile and data packages. In addition to those, devices like phones, tablets and value-adding services like VPN and firewall packages needed to be offered too.

The tools in use were outdated and not user-friendly, so the aim was to create something that offered all of the above (with their product-specific requirements) but was intuitive and easy to use without extensive training. The sales tool had to guide the user from the initial selection of products until the very end of the sales flow, including the customer’s final signature.

Business rules had to be built into offerings so that sales personnel wouldn’t have to remember what they could or could not offer in certain situations. There are also differences between consumer and business clients, for which different requirements and sales flows needed to be used.  

Using data to offer more value 

But there are pitfalls to ordering products if we don’t know what a customer already has or what they can have. The sales tool had to know about a customer’s existing products, benefits they were eligible for, technical limitations of the infrastructure at their residence, and so forth. There were also different rules governing salespeople and what they could sell. The sales tool was built to check all of these things and more before deciding which new products and offerings to show a specific customer. The tool had to know if the customer had used free trials already, or if they should be offered one now. Were they a consumer or a small business? Salespeople in the physical stores also had a different set of options from phone sales, which had to be taken into account when showing an available list of products.

Simplifying the work of salespeople 

To make the customer experience smooth, the salesperson must know what interactions other salespeople have had with the same customer. Making note of these interactions had previously been manual work, which was easily forgotten on busy days. To remedy this, the new sales tool needed to record the gist of customer interactions after each sale – who sold what to whom. It is a demonstration of customer care when sales people do not begin a customer interaction with questions about previous meetings. The sales tool provided that information in an easy-to-read format. 

Salespeople also needed a way to view previous orders. We built a dealer-specific order history, complete with contracts and contents of the cart. Logs and interactions could also be viewed by customer care agents, who often needed to trace a customer’s history to provide service. Sometimes agents also needed to act on behalf of other salespeople, for which a customer care role with more privileges was added to the sales tool.

Impact on the customer´s business 

Our client achieved their goal to simplify the consumer sales process.  

• The time required to service one client was reduced. Customer care is now able to service four times more clients in a single day. 
• The need for specialized in-house training teams was eliminated, since training new employees is now faster and easier. 
• Business rules are followed more easily. This resulted in 80 percent fewer mistakes in sales prices and fewer inconveniences for both the client and the customer.
• There is now less work for customer care personnel due to the elimination of human error.