A leading provider of funeral goods and services based in the United States, with nearly 2,000 locations in North America, faced an emerging challenge: Their current way of selling services was rapidly becoming obsolete by the emergence of mobile-first customer experiences.
To fully understand the problem in the field, Lextech conducted a series of ride-alongs with sales reps, posing as trainees to see how sales reps used their current tools during actual in-home customer visits. Lextech also (with the permission of the company) posed as potential customers, to see how sales reps used (or didn’t use) technology to interact.
It was apparent that the existing sales platform was difficult to use and maintain, which often resulted in lost sales and data entry mistakes. Many sales reps resorted to paper backups and home-grown sales materials because of these many technical problems.
Lextech sythesized previous company research on customer experience and helped the company evaluate a prototype of a replacement sales platform designed to be more mobile friendly and modern.
Based on our employee experience research, we pushed the company to think more strategically rather than focus on technical implementation.
Rather than push out a gigantic sales platform without field input, consider an alternative set of smaller tools: one for training (to help new reps) and one for exploring product options (to maximize sales). Furthermore, sales reps wanted the ability to have these tools on their personal iOS devices rather than be limited to just the company’s hardware.
The Result
The company gained clear understanding of field sales needs to build a program plan to address them. Lextech identified the top features and capabilities sales reps needed in the field, and prioritized them by speed to value. Lextech also helped them understand the pros/cons and costs of maintaining existing technology vs. pivoting to new hardware.
