Case Study

Team Performance and Goal Tracking

Prime Capital are a Financial Services company specialising in accelerating the mortgage application process. Prime Capital have a unique sales team culture which uses messaging for team communication, recording and broadcasting business successes and individual progress against personal development plans.

AlphaIndigo were engaged to automate this process and deliver improved productivity without losing the organic nature of messaging as an achievement and performance culture team enabler. AlphaIndigo used their deep experience in business consulting, messaging automation and software solution design to devise a unique and easy to use automated solution.

Background

Prime Capital have a daily morning check-in process where each sales team member posts their overall performance rating (Red, Amber or Green) for the month to-date, and informs the rest of the team about their personal and work-related tasks to be completed for the day, chosen from their own personal development plan.

The team used a combination of Excel for formal reporting, and WhatsApp for messaging about their plans for the day. Later in the day, each team member would post a retrospective of their achievements for the day, awarding themselves a trophy 🏆 for achievement, or clock 🕗 if they need more time.

Complication

The existing process impacted productivity  :

1. Dashboard reporting using an Excel sheet meant team members needed to be in the office to update - one person at a time.

2. Performance data was manually collated from the CRM and re-typed to the dashboard spreadsheet. In a single week, across the small team, this amounted to a whole days effort.

3. While the team were rigorous about providing on-time morning and afternoon updates, the content of the updates was free-form text, not linked to personal plans. None of the tasks could be tracked for end of month/year performance reviews.

solution

AlphaIndigo were initially tasked with designing a mobile app to capture the data. However, taking a user-centred approach to mitigate the end-user impact, an innovative solution was put together which didn't require a bespoke mobile app. Instead a structure was created to retain messaging as a core enabler, while introducing a supporting flexible data-set and structured goal tracking.

1. The team was switched from WhatsApp to Slack, replacing the consumer messaging app with an Enterprise-grade messaging platform to get access to additional benefits such as chatbots, form-based data capture and automation.

2. Shared Google sheets were introduced to replace Excel - replacing a static on-premise primary data source with a shared cloud service with API access.

3. A set of bespoke Slack applications were designed and developed to :

   • pull data from Google sheets

   • present the performance data for the user in a structured form within Slack

   • push Slack messages out to the rest of the team, and

   • push personal performance information back to Google sheets for later viewing and reporting.

4. Zapier was used to automate a variety of tasks, including replacing the manual collation of live data from the API of the Prime Capital CRM to push into a Google sheet dashboard.