Turning Downtime Into Opportunity!

[mbarone]

2018 Excellence Awards Entry: Turning Downtime Into Opportunity!

Name:  Michael Barone

Title:  Data Scientist

Company:  Paychex, Inc

Overview of Use Case:

What does a sales rep do when they have an hour to kill, or an appointment cancels?

(a)  Dry cleaning

(b)  Wander the local strip mall and cold-call on a local business.

(c)  Use the "Paychex Info-on-the-Go" app built with Alteryx to instantly search their immediate vicinity for valuable, analytics-informed opportunities to up-sell/cross-sell a current client; gain a referral from a CPA (CPAs are one of our top referral channels); and look for potential new clients.

The correct answer of course is (c) - use the Paychex Info-on-the-Go App!

When sales reps go out in the field, oftentimes they are left with a small amount of downtime between appointments, or perhaps an appointment cancelled.  They'd like to be able to quickly and easily scan the immediate area for clients they can up-sell/cross-sell to; a CPA to gain a good lead from; and prospect information they might not have been aware of.  There’s an app for that!  The app makes use of spatial data, our Gallery (via Server), and reporting tools (maps and tables).  The user can run the app anywhere, anytime, and get back immediate results.  A report will be generated with a Map, hyperlinks to Salesforce.com and Google Maps, and tables with both basic information, and predictive modeling scores for up-selling/cross-selling.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve:

How to turn downtime into opportunity for increased sales, product penetration, and leads using technology that taps into our rich and robust data, as well as advanced analytical intelligence.  We wanted to put this in the hands of our sales reps, while they are out on the go, so they can obtain it at any time, and be relevant for their specific location at that time.

Describe your working solution:

Let’s start with the end result, since this is what I saw in my mind’s eye as I was thinking this through.

The user logs into the gallery, and pulls up the app:

When they click run, the following app user interface displays:

When they run this app, I want the results to display to them on-screen, but also give them the ability to export them.  So I need to output the final report as PCXML in the render tool. 

I wanted the final results to look like this:

The map outlines the drive time radius, and has different colored points for clients, CPAs, and prospects.  Below the map is a table for the clients/CPAs/prospects that were found.  The red oval columns are the ID number, which would be hyperlinked to the applicable Salesforce.com account.  The blue oval columns are the addresses which would be hyperlinked to Google Maps, and the gold oval column is the predictive model score for whatever model(s) they chose.

In order to make this happen, I had to consolidate several different large CYDBs, create macros to comb through the CYDBs, create key-value YXDBs for pick lists to display interactivity to the user, make use of spatial data, user-interface design tools (numeric up/down, list box, check box), report maps & tables (including hyperlinks to Google Maps and Salesforce.com).

The images below walk through the build process for this app:

The app interface layout design:

Note that the two hyperlinks are configured as follows:

For the Models-at-a-Glance hyperlink:

And the email hyperlink:

Describe the benefits you have achieved:

This app pulls together information and data about our clients, CPAs, and prospects, along with advanced analytical intelligence (our predictive model scores).  It provides the sales rep this information within seconds while they are on-the-go.  During our beta for this app, reps told us they discovered clients/CPAs/prospects in their area that they didn't know existed.  Several of those opportunities were turned into sales.