Sean Crowley, President, North America In the wake of growing competition in the retail industry, today’s stores and product manufactures require a versatile workforce that will efficiently complete tasks ranging from training, merchandising, on floor sales, tracking customer feedback to customer service. With the rise of in-store technology and access to real-time product information, vendors can be easily overwhelmed with ever-changing training and consumer needs. These vendors can now use highly specialized field labor management technology to help track and analyze stores, products, competition as well as reps and consumer behavior. Next generation solutions are now providing more intelligence and automation than ever before. Westlake Software, a company that provides such a solution is helping retailers and product manufactures maximize the potential of every employee and sale with its service platform called Airmobility.net™.
“Airmobility.net is currently deployed in over 80 countries servicing over 50,000 retail outlets globally,” states Sean Crowley, President of North America. “Airmobility.net combines a fully customizable form creation engine (surveys, audits, call reports, sales forms, etc.), a fully customizable training platform to train both employees and associated representatives and a comprehensive document/resource file manager.” The platform enables retailers to upload any type of file—audio, video, graphics, PDF, Microsoft Office documents—and distribute them to a field labor force of any size and in real-time. “The solution encapsulates a trainer module to support the distribution of training materials while delivering and tracking the trainings of in-store representatives,” says Crowley.
AIRmobility.net also supports a wide spectrum of features and functions including fully integrated GPS tracking and mapping, an integrated back-office exchange, internal breaking news feed, custom reporting, and dashboards.
Collecting field labor data is one thing, generating actionable intelligence from this data and then automating the re-direction of a field labor teams from this intelligence is next generation technology
“We can effectively distribute large volumes of information to an unlimited number of PCs or mobile devices simultaneously and then collect data and integrate this to any back-office system our enterprise customers use today,” notes Crowley.
At the center of Airmobility.net is a dynamic form generation platform. Customers can re-create any field labor form supporting pick lists, bar coding, NFC, photos, signatures, documents and graphics, etc., translate to multiple languages at the same time and populate that to a variety of mobile devices. “This is heavily used in the retail sector to track and help manufacturers and retailers assess what is going on in each store and ensure employees are working efficiently. Our applications are not just web based; we support true apps that offer full store-and-forward technology to allow our users to work in and out of wireless coverage or can be 100 percent wifi dependent with no cell service,” says Crowley.
Typical customers are national or global enterprise organizations with a diversity of products and field labor teams. “We offer our customers the knowledge, experience and technology on how to best organize, track, analyze information as well as direct teams to help sell more product and provide better customer relations,” states Crowley. “Collecting product or store information is relatively straight forward, however, creating reports, dashboards, and alerts that help our customers interpret and then automatically improve future results of that information is key. Airmobility.net not only uncovers actionable intelligence, it offers the ability to automate changes to the system based off that intelligence. For example, if a store is not performing well based off of sales indicators, that can instantly trigger specific new questions in call reports and display new trainings to be distributed,” concluded Crowley.
