Don’t Settle for Sheet

Gathering data about your company might seem intimidating or even down-right hard. You might have the knowledge of what information would be useful or even profitable to your business but getting a process set up can be intimidating. What vehicle should you use to collect data? It almost always comes down to a battle between the familiarity of paper or the convenience of mobile. Join us in a walk through both scenarios...

The Paper Route

Let’s say you own a chain of stores all across the country. It is your job to make sure that all locations are properly running promotions, maintaining a high level of service, and simply making money. So how do you ensure brand quality? Most people initially opt for the paper option, and it’s understandable as it’s what we all grew up on. But through our experience it is not always the best method, and let us explain why.

1) Formatting Nightmare
Paper can be a formatting nightmare. Whether you are typing a word doc, spreadsheet, or an email, trying to create a form that has good flow and organization is cumbersome. Changing sections and questions and rearranging wording is not intuitive and eats up time.

2) Juggling Act
It also becomes harder on your team. First they have to find a way to print your form ( if you’ve dealt with printers, you know it's not always the easiest of tasks). Then, users have to drive to your store locations and juggle their coffee, phones, forms, pens, and keys. That just sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

3) Doing the Job Twice
Oh, and we haven’t even begun to dive into the challenge of getting the information back to you! Once they’ve done the hard work of gathering the data, your team then needs to retype it and email, text, or snail-mail it back to you. This means that the data they collected at your stores is aging before it even get’s to you.

4) YOU Crunch the Numbers
When you finally receive the data, you then have fun task of organizing and analyzing the information. This takes time. Even if you are diligent and speedy with the data, it’s still days, weeks and sometimes months old, depending on the volume. This does nobody a service. You’ve spent most of your time analyzing and then reacting to old data instead of proactively predicting new trends and capturing potential revenue opportunities.

And so the cycle continues…

Instead, try Mobile.

Mobile

Start by looking around next time you are on the bus, walking down the street or even at a bar. You might notice that almost everyone is on their phone, taking photos or texting. So why not keep it simple? When you need to gather information about your business, have your team use the tool they are already equipped with… a mobile device!

Let’s take the same scenario from earlier, but in this instance we are going to explain the benefits of going mobile with Zenput.

1) Simple Form Creation and Distribution
Creating forms in Zenput takes but minutes. All questions and form layouts use drag-and-drop functionality. So when building your form if you need to change the order or add in an extra question or two, no problem!

After you’ve built your form, it takes mere seconds to distribute it to your team. Just enter their email address or phone number and use one click to share!

2) Easy Access
From your team’s side, all they need to do is download the Zenput app and instantly have access to your forms. As you can imagine, this makes “show- time" even easier. Think about it. All your people really need when they travel to your store locations is their phone. With their phones, they can efficiently do their jobs, snap photos and even take videos.

3) Accountability
No more guessing as to whether or not your team was really at the location filling out your forms, or at the beach. There is a time/date stamp as well as GPS loaded directly into the app so that you can make sure that your people are getting their work done when and where they are supposed to.

4) Real-time data that you don’t have to crunch
Remember all the analytic work you were going to have to do if you went the paper route? Yeah, you can say goodbye to all of that. If you go mobile with Zenput, all data and graphs are updated in real-time. This saves you time and allows you to be proactive, rather than reactive with important business decisions.

So we plead with you, don’t settle for sheet. Going mobile will save you money, increase accountability within your organization, and allow you to capture those once hidden economic opportunities.