Door-to-door sales can be difficult to perform and even more difficult to track. Given this, Scotts LawnService had an obvious need to transition their existing paper process with a digital one. They had a long list of pain-points with the existing process which we were deterimined to get right in ours.
In order to understand what they were experiencing, we went door-to-door with sales reps, seeing the process and talking to the people that experinced the frustrations first-hand. From there we built a web application and accompanying Android app that mimicked their "knock sheets" but went several steps further. Using GPS and their existing database, we were able to pre-fill many of the fields they use to write manually every time. We tracked each step of the sales process with a digital questionaire. When a sale was made, the app integrated with a credit-card reader and securely processed the sale over an encrypted connection to Scott's credit card payment processor.
The impact we saw from this project was incredible. Both the sales reps and their supervisors expressed a feeling of improved efficiency and customers spent less time waiting while the sales reps filled out paperwork. This not only decreased stress among the workforce but also considerably boosted sales (to record numbers). It also spawned an open-source project from our efforts with credit card reader decryption.
Between the clear improvements to people's lives and the range of technical challenges, this project is excellent representaion of why we love what we do and why we want to keep doing it.
