Our solution has enabled Modern Pest to reduce the amount of time needed to train a new customer service rep, and also improve the product pricing accuracy.
CHALLENGE
Modern Pest is a subsidiary of Anticimex, a global pest extermination company. In working with its clients to develop new quotes for potential customers, Modern Pest was dissatisfied with their existing customer relationship management (CRM) tool which had a complex, hard to use user interface, and a steep learning curve. This made it time consuming for sales reps to learn how to use it, and to set up an order. Consequently, they had to hire more service reps to handle their order traffic. It was also expensive and did not have a pricing calculator for Modern Pest’s products, forcing sales reps to use tabular product pricing printouts and enter pricing data manually. Unfortunately this meant that there were often errors and inconsistencies. Although Modern Pest was already using an industry-standard CRM built for the extermination industry called PestPac, its inefficiencies drove Modern Pest to seek a more custom-fit solution.
SOLUTION
In late 2019, Modern Pest approached Portland Webworks regarding the creation of an application to streamline setting up orders for new customers. Our engagement began by conducting a discovery process to identify how the order intake process could be streamlined. Working closely with the client, we created wireframes for a new application to capture the key information needed to set up an order. We integrated various other systems into the new ‘Agreement’ application, including integrations with Zillow to auto-populate a property’s information (e.g. square footage), PestPac (Modern Pest’s own CRM and service-scheduling platform), and PandaDoc (to e-sign customer service contracts). We used an Agile, iterative approach, focusing on producing an MVP to keep within budget. Using commonly available tools like Google’s Material user interface kit we focused on simplifying the build-test-refine cycle, and providing workable prototypes for the client to react to and refine.
RESULT
The newly developed ‘Agreement’ application system interacts with, and improves on Modern Pest’s own systems to significantly speed up the customer order setup process. It includes details on the property being evaluated, the service(s) being considered and ultimately selected, payment processing, and the ability for quotes to be turned into signed contracts. The estimation and quoting platform has improved customer service, reduced the number of data entry errors, and simplified overall operations. Our solution has enabled Modern Pest to reduce the amount of time needed to train a new customer service rep, and also improve the product pricing accuracy.
