Case study client: The Creative Counsel

The Creative Counsel is a business specialising in promotions and marketing. The company has evolved and grown remarkably to become one of the most pre-eminent organisations in its kind in southern Africa.

With offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, The Creative Counsel strives for nothing but excellence.

“There is little question that this delivers a competitive advantage! We can design and deploy new questionnaires practically off the cuff and report back on what is happening on the ground, across the country, within days.”

Technologies:
Silverlight
VisionForms
Microsoft SQL Server 2008
ASP.Net

Market intelligence is highly valuable for many companies that reach a mass audience. However, gathering that information is a substantial challenge: with mobile forces in the field, there are the attendant difficulties in designing questionnaires, delivering them to mobile devices and then collecting and collating that information back to a central source.

nVisionIT has solved this challenge for promotions and marketing specialist The Creative Counsel (TCC), with its innovative VisionForms solution, which allows for the simple creation of custom forms that are delivered to mobile handsets.

Clinton Else, Business Operations Manager at TCC, explains the challenge faced by the company: “In days gone by, collection of customer feedback would be done using a clipboard and a pen, polling people at shopping centres and other outlets. While the advent of powerful handheld devices such as smartphones has greatly alleviated this task, the creation of appropriate forms has remained difficult,” he says.

With a range of clients requiring a broad range of information to be collected in the field, he says the new challenge was to flexibly create new electronic questionnaires and then distribute them to the handsets of its field agents.

“Every time we had a request from a client, we would require bespoke development, which is time-consuming, costly and unwieldy. We needed something that would let us create forms ourselves, without the need for specialist technology knowledge, and in a very short space of time.”

nVisionIT technical director Nick McKenzie says the company had a solution in the works even before TCC came knocking. “Through the course of our work, it is apparent that good deals of companies have ongoing requirements for forms to guide and structure the capture of information. As a result, we'd been developing a solution that would offer a 'drag and drop' electronic form creation.”

That solution is VisionForms. “VisionForms is the culmination of years of work in the mobile space. It makes the creation of custom information gathering tools simple: anyone who can use a computer can use it. There's no need to understand form design or database structures; it is driven by dropdown selections and is entirely Web-based, so there is no need to even install anything on the user's computer,” he explains.

Else says the solution is remarkably easy to use. “We will frequently have clients requiring some sort of information collection at the last minute. With VisionForms, we can create a new questionnaire by accessing a site, introducing up to 10 new questions within an hour. It literally takes a couple of clicks with a mouse to get everything up and running.”

When completed, the form is distributed to the handsets of field agents by sending a URL from which they access the questionnaire. The server-side database is built in the background, ready to accept and collate the information that is entered by agents in the field. “Importantly,” notes McKenzie, “By using Microsoft Silverlight technology in the design, the forms are platform independent. That means 99% of handsets can run the solution, taking out the commonly encountered issue of incompatibility. There is no need, therefore, for TCC to specify the handsets that their agents can use. As long as the smartphone has a WAP browser, it can access VisionForms.”

Using VisionForms, says Else, has dramatically changed the way TCC is able to execute this particular aspect of its business. “In many instances, we'd find ourselves with customer requests for an off-the-cuff project to, for example, assess the performance of a campaign or gather other information. Previously, there was a limited ability to respond to such requests rapidly, as custom development would be required.”

That would also affect the cost of such projects; Else says managing forms was previously a 'nightmare of code and complexity'.

Now, Else relates, TCC account managers can literally sit in front of their clients, design an appropriate form and dispatch it to field agents. “With a couple of clicks to define what we'd like asked and to define what is required from a reporting point of view, it is possible to have a working solution in the field on the same day. Once published to our field agents, as the forms are filled in they push the information back to the server and we can deliver the intelligence required by the client,” he says.

The flexibility of the solution is noteworthy, Else adds, as even relatively low-end smartphones can be used. “Many of the field agents are students and have entry-level devices; with VisionForms, that's no problem.”

VisionForms, he notes, has revolutionised this aspect of TCC's business. “There is little question that this delivers a competitive advantage. We can design and deploy new questionnaires practically off the cuff and report back on what is happening on the ground, across the country, within days,” he concludes.

For further information: http://www.nvisionit.co.za