Catcher Digital Marketing delivers measurable growth for consumer brands with Flowfinity

Region: Canada - Nationwide
Company Size: Medium Enterprise
Industry: Marketing, Consumer Packaged Goods, Retail Audit
Function: Staff Management, Field Dispatch, Survey Data Collection and Reporting

Background

Catcher Digital Marketing constructs sophisticated online marketing strategies delivered using tactics that produce effective, measurable business growth for their clients.

They create value by providing the right digital tools to provide timely market research, results are reported using intuitive data visualizations that enable informed decision making. Hundreds of Brand Ambassadors are tasked with performing audits, interviews, and observations at thousands of convenience stores and retail locations nationwide.

Their growing client base includes international consumer packaged goods firms with portfolios of iconic global brands that are familiar throughout North America and beyond. Consumer packaged goods is a highly competitive sector due to high market saturation and low costs; consumers can easily and cheaply switch their brand loyalties.

Catcher's clients need to adapt strategy and tactics quickly to stay ahead in this fast-changing environment. The key is to have fresh, reliable market data on an ongoing basis. In addition, they need to see and understand trends from that market data to adjust offers and campaigns accordingly, sometimes on a daily basis.

By adopting the Flowfinity no-code platform to configure custom applications for staff management, dispatch and data collection, Catcher can offer their clients the flexibility to make complex changes to their marketing audit programs on the fly.

The flexibility and control they have over retail audit market data collection provides a significant advantage because they are able to respond more quickly to changing market dynamics than competitors using off the shelf retail audit software or basic forms.

Additionally, because they spend less effort on data manipulation and management, Catcher enjoys a competitive cost structure they can easily replicate to generate repeatable high value business from their clients in consumer packaged goods.

The Challenge

To gather the market intelligence their clients need Catcher provides a full compliment of services and employs a team of Brand Ambassadors to perform in-store audits, mystery shops and interviews at convenience and grocery stores across Canada, resulting in thousands of visits per month.

"We survey retail staff about their brand awareness and product knowledge across our client's product lines and also perform observations of customer interactions in-store," explains Paul Allison, Director of Digital Marketing at Catcher.

Previously audits were conducted using clipboards and pens to fill out forms. However, that meant sorting through huge piles of paperwork and significant time spent on redundant data entry. It was also cumbersome and expensive to make changes to survey formats as thousands of new forms needed to be printed for every update.

They saw the need to digitize data capture and initially tried a solution using digital forms built using a basic survey app, which offered the flexibility to easily make minor changes.

However, they soon found the collection capabilities to be rudimentary as the data could not be housed separately from the app for manipulation and visualization. Although it was an improvement over paper forms, the basic digital survey solution also couldn't manage staffing and dispatching workflows, which meant processes remained siloed.

Catcher needed a platform that was flexible enough to handle daily ad hoc survey changes while keeping the data separate from their apps in a central database. Data had to be easily manipulated and interpreted using interactive dashboards, plus they wanted a unified system to manage all aspects of their retail audit operations. A tall order!

The Solution

The search was on to find an effective way to bridge these process gaps. After evaluating several potential solutions, Catcher found that while off-the-shelf software was good for basic data capture and reporting it wasn't flexible enough to cover all the different processes they wanted to manage. Meanwhile, other no-code application platforms were too inflexible, meaning they were restrictive in how they could be deployed by design. These were deal-breaking functional limitations.

Then Paul discovered Flowfinity and gave it a trial.

"There was a bit of a learning curve, but once I decided how I wanted to structure our apps and programs, we had a pretty sophisticated solution in the field within a couple of weeks," recalls Paul. "The other systems were basically just form fillers and the biggest things for me were control and flexibility."

Using Flowfinity, Catcher was able to keep their data separate from their applications in a central SQL server and build one unified system to manage all their core processes:

• Brand Ambassador Management (Staffing)
• Field Dispatch (Work Orders)
• Data Collection (Surveys and Reports)

Brand Ambassador Management

With a fluid and growing team of hundreds of Brand Ambassadors across the country, it was important to have a convenient way to manage staffing resources and efficiently assign licenses to one or more marketing programs.

Now managers can quickly onboard new users or reallocate credentials and devices by ensuring licenses are tied to programs and managed from a central app that also integrates with their dispatch and reporting solutions.

Meanwhile, Brand Ambassadors have access to personalized views in the application, showing only their assigned programs. This simplifies record sharing and assignments, something that was not possible to do with basic spreadsheet-based platforms.

Field Dispatch

Catcher Digital is responsible for auditing over 2600 retail locations across Canada, since each carries various product lines that equates to 6000 – 7000 store visits every month!

Manually dispatching hundreds of Brand Ambassadors was a significant challenge before digitizing and automating workflows with Flowfinity. After configuring a dedicated dispatch app at no additional cost, Catcher now enjoys an effective solution to assign and track audit locations and users. Automated notifications help provide insight into field operations to ensure everything remains on track.

Flowfinity also works offline, so even if a retail location is in a remote area or there is a loss of network or Wi-Fi coverage, Brand Ambassadors can still complete their surveys as normal. The results are then automatically pushed to the server for reporting once an internet connection is re-established.

Data Collection and Reporting

The primary use case for Catcher’s deployment of no-code apps was to ensure data accuracy at the point of collection while remaining flexible enough to handle changes on the fly and providing enough control over their own systems and processes.

Paul says they’ve achieved this with Flowfinity, "We're updating our survey and programs in real time. We can push app updates out as ad hoc requests from our clients come in while Brand Ambassadors are actively using Flowfinity in the field, this can happen on an hourly basis multiple times per day."

Catcher also takes advantage of rich data collection features, including attaching photographs and voice notes to records to provide context and validation of audits.

When the information is packaged up for a client, interactive dashboards provide intuitive visualizations to highlight KPIs and help make informed decisions. They can also drill down into the data, view and edit individual records, and even launch workflows directly from their dashboards, making for an engaging and enjoyable user experience.

The Results

Paul credits the flexibility of the Flowfinity no-code platform for empowering the team at Catcher to build rich marketing audit solutions for their clients and gain a significant advantage over competing firms with less advanced digital systems.

Now Catcher has integrated Flowfinity applications in the field to handle the three pillars of their retail audit programs. "It's great for reporting but also so much more. We're managing users, dispatching, collecting and manipulating rich data, creating dashboard visualizations, and doing all this on the fly," says Paul.

With Flowfinity no-code means no compromise. It's a platform that’s totally unrestrictive and the solutions Catcher has configured are embraced by their clients to help drive competitive advantage and ultimately their bottom line.

The time saved managing staff, assignments, and reporting plus the ability to respond to program change requests instantly has been a game-changer for Catcher. They now leverage their experience with Flowfinity's automation tools to drive repeatable high value business from their clients and seek new relationships based on their advantage.

Going Forward

Given how successful their Flowfinity deployment has been at transforming consumer packaged goods retail audit operations, Catcher is looking at replicating their data collection solution for other clients and product lines.

"Flowfinity is critical to the success of our clients' programs, which can be up to a half million dollars investment each, because we can trust that the data we collect is accurate and easily manipulated to provide meaningful insights they can take action on," says Paul. "It's been so successful we have other major clients looking at this solution."

To improve their existing solutions, Catcher is considering integrating GIS maps to help Brand Ambassadors know where they are and better manage their assignments each day. They’re also considering how to further automate workflows using software robots.

Whatever direction Catcher decides to take, Flowfinity will be here to help drive digital transformation in the consumer-packaged goods and retail audit sectors.