REBORRN for G4S: Designing the Offer-to-sale Webapp.
By: George Theodorou
Tags: Product Design, Offer To Sales Tool, Web App

We could safely say that, this is a short story of how we fought against Microsoft Excel and actually won. Don’t get us wrong. We use excel sheets everyday. But, no, this is not the right tool when you aspire to elevate your game with automations, advanced analytics and more complex processes. For these cases, you definitely need to go a step further. Especially if you are G4S, the world’s largest Security Services Company with hundreds of thousands of employees and millions of customers.

Working in close partnership with them for almost two years, taught us quite a lot about the big companies’ struggle with digital transformation. G4S has embarked on a brave transformational journey, experimenting with new commercial models, launching smart security systems to the market, and automating internal processes replacing legacy systems by using cloud based applications. At REBORRN we consider ourselves lucky to be part of this journey.

As part of a wider initiative to change the company’s technology infrastructure with cloud based applications, this story focuses on our work with the retail salesforce team. To rethink the internal process but also the ways we interact with the customers, we built together with G4S our own “Offer-to-sale Webapp”, a made-to-order solution to a before manual process: setting up a services offer for a client and getting their acceptance.

The two steps of the Offer-to-sale Webapp: offer creation & online checkout. Check out more here.

But, did they really need this?

Yes. In fact, G4S salesforce needed an internal tool that would allow them to be super quick and efficient when it comes to building an offer for a smart home security system. We are talking about a dynamic team that is continuously on the move, balancing their time between meetings with clients and admin work. They needed speed and simplicity. They needed automation. Instead, they had to work among excels, printers and post offices. On the other hand, G4S customers needed a magic link that gives them access to their offer, an easy overview of their contract terms and direct payment methods. All in all, they needed a paperless, short process to follow.

Note: We figured out that in most service companies like telcos, banks and insurance, the process of making an offer and especially exposing this offer to the customer is broken. In most cases, customers receive several Documents printed or at best in PDF format.

The complete cycle when it comes to a new offer within our digital tool includes 2 distinct steps with 2 separate users-receivers. To start with, the one stands for the offer creation, taking under consideration the client’s needs and overall cost, concluding to the ideal security services proposal. This is the sellers’ part and also the first page of the webapp. The second stage consists of the actual online checkout by the client. The ideal process here would be: starting with a comprehensive overview of the offer -with information on materials and services included-, getting to a simple form to gather all necessary personal information and the detailed terms and conditions summary, concluding with payments and sign offs. Not more than 4 simple steps, which is exactly what the webapp promises.

As we always do, we chose an agile way of working for this project with a pilot-and-adapt mentality, dividing our timeline in sprints and setting weekly status meetings in order to discuss progress, pending requests and conflicts. Our business process optimisation consultant who led the project, was mostly working from the G4S premises in order to make things proceed faster and minimise any communication gaps. We involved a multi-disciplinary team of consultants, G4S project owners, CRM specialists, designers and developers, creating a partnership approach rather than a client-consultant relationship.

Setting up an offer on the move, without sacrificing design or a bunch of trees.

Offer-to-sale Webapp is, first and foremost, a seller’s digital assistant, turning hardcopies into a few clicks on their tablets. Automation isn’t just a way to maintain information, it’s a constant reminder to sellers to focus on identifying carefully their customers’ needs rather than working on mathematical operations.

The tool though, is much more than just another calculator that makes sums. Well-balanced and thoughtfully designed, a one-pager solution where functionality hides behind every step. Different products to add, services to include or exclude, discounts to consider. Ownership and independence are encouraged but the company could intervene at any moment, vetoing disadvantageous proposals, e.g. warning messages for central approvals pop out against unreasonable discounts.

To give you an overview of the impact the tool had, it would be enough to describe what sellers did before. They were referring to some excel sheets to gather all the products’ information and to share the subscriptions’ details, passing to word templates and filling in the gaps. Then getting to print the documents and preparing the hard copies that the clients would receive via post. Doing those steps once was not always the end of the road. Clients are continuously asking for better prices, more services, that extra feature they noticed in your site and so on. This means that the processes described above needed to be repeated, like a vicious cycle of manual work. We are sure that this is a common story for most of the companies out there.

So what we did was to connect the dots: give sellers the possibility to prepare an offer on the go, allowing a real-time alignment with customers. Hardcopies are over, everything is now digital, faster and more cohesive. All steps are supported in the app and the team can share the outcome with their clients directly via email. Transparency is fostered as all information lies under the company’s CRM entity.