Our client was a lead generation company that provided janitorial services in the US. They had engaged call centers and freelancers across India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines to generate leads. The vendors were paid a bonus only when a lead was invoiced to a customer. To manage this, the client had created a complex structure of spreadsheets.

   The spreadsheets were structured in a way that everyone involved in the process would have access to the required data. Each vendor maintained their own spreadsheet with basic lead details like date, name, and appointment date. After generating a lead, they would add the information to their individual sheet and send it to Quality Assurance (QA). QA would go through the call recording and copy the valid leads’ information from the individual vendor sheet to a master data sheet. They would then add the customer’s name and a few more details to the master sheet and send this information to the customer.

   The invoicing to customers was done weekly, and the accounts person had access to the master sheet. They would filter out the leads due for invoicing, take the rate from another spreadsheet, and invoice the customer. Once invoiced, the master sheet would be updated with invoicing details, and QA would copy the information from the master sheet to individual center sheets and mark the leads as invoiced. The center would then send the bill for the invoiced leads. The biggest challenge was to keep all these sheets updated, resulting in disputes when information was missed in any one sheet. Additionally, QA spent almost 40% of their time maintaining these sheets.

   We identified that the data maintained in multiple sheets was the biggest issue. With the growth in the number of centers, it was becoming impossible to update data at so many sheets. We wanted to find a solution where we could have a centralized database with all the columns, and we could hide or grant view or edit access to the stakeholder depending upon their role. So that all stakeholders could update the data at a single place, and the same would be updated in the master data automatically.

   We found an online database tool called Knack that allowed us to prepare a centralized database with pages specific to users. We could create different users with different page view rights. The beauty of this database was that we didn’t need to know coding to create a tool using it. There were many similar tools available online, but they all had subscription plans based on the number of users. Knack was the only tool where the price was based on the number of records, which was perfect for our client’s 150-170 vendors and 10-15 internal users.

  We replaced the spreadsheet with Knack and structured the tool so that basic lead information was filled in a form by vendors. As soon as the information was submitted, the lead appeared in the “”Leads for Review”” section for QA. QA listened to the recording and marked the lead valid or invalid. Once QA updated the validation status, the lead was automatically emailed to the customer, and an automatic report was generated each week for the invoicing team. Any field updates made by any user would be reflected in all other user views. So, once a lead was marked as invoiced, the vendor would also be able to see that the lead was invoiced to the customer, and it could be added to the current invoice. The QA now only updated the status of leads as valid or invalid, and no copying of data from multiple individual sheets to the master data or vice versa was required.

   Onboarding new vendors is now easy, as we only need to create a login for them. No separate spreadsheets are required, and email communications within the team for lead status and forwarding leads to QA are completely abolished. The implementation resulted in greater visibility, productivity, and efficiency for the organization.