Christopher J Pizzi

Brought Efficiency to Sister Company's Field Operations

Challenge: Sister company needs a more efficient way of directing and collecting data from their field staff

Solution: Use RetailStream to eliminate manual distribution & collection of faxes, spreadsheets, and email

Pierce Promotions is a sister company to National In-Store. They specialize in in-store product demonstrations using talent contracted from dozens of regional talent agencies. They used NIS's expertise in data collection and its call center to support their field operations.

In order to support Pierce, I modified RetailStream and created new Salesforce.com and Angel.com applications. The RetailStream modifications were threefold: implementation of automatic email notifications for new and incomplete work, bulk-load processes for automated data feeds from their debit-card based timeclock system, and a bulk-load process for a Pierce-specific staffing and job assignment spreadsheet.

I created a Python application to periodically poll RetailStream for new or late Pierce assignments and send the appropriate notifications. I created a PL/SQL program to transform and load the automated timeclock and staffing data feeds into RetailStream's database.

Pierce staff would be able to call the NIS call center to report and receive guidance on any problems they encounter with the event or with their debit cards. I created a Salesforce.com application for the call center staff to log these calls and route the cases to the appropriate Pierce or NIS account managers.

I created two Angel.com applications for the call center as well, one an IVR system to log incoming calls, take voicemail, and route calls to Pierce support staff. The second was an outbound application that allowed pierce to broadcast reminders to any staff who had not yet sent in timesheets or otherwise had not reported their work in RetailStream. This system was a command-line PHP application called Angel.com web services to initiate the broadcasts.