GoSpotCheck delivers data experiences that drive competitive advantage for consumer-facing enterprise teams
About GoSpotCheck
GoSpotCheck is a mobile task management platform for teams that connects frontline employees with corporate goals and directives, creates a shared view of the field, and helps leaders make better decisions, faster.
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Contact usGoSpotCheck teams with Looker to build for speed, scale, and customization.
Google Cloud results
- By combining the flexibility of the GSC and Looker platforms, the GSC team has created customized data experiences that transform business outcomes for diverse enterprise teams and its own internal users
- Switching to Looker resulted in numerous time savings, including a 70% decrease in report building time
- Since implementing Looker, Fivetran, and Snowflake, GSC’s data pipeline now returns insights to customers 95% faster
- As of fall 2020, GSC has completed 225 custom projects and serves Looker insights to almost 9,000 users per month
- In addition to delivering insights to customers, the GSC team uses Looker internally to monitor customer health signals, manage customer and industry portfolios, track corporate scorecard metrics, and more
GoSpotCheck (GSC) is a mobile task management platform for enterprise teams that connects frontline workers with corporate goals and directives, creates a shared view of the field, and helps leaders make better decisions, faster. The GSC platform was designed to flexibly support diverse business processes previously completed with pen and paper, Excel, Sharepoint, email, or internally developed apps. Teams use GSC to complete tasks on mobile devices, and as tasks are completed, leaders receive insights about the work being done across locations through reporting dashboards that track activity in real time. Organizations use GSC to improve daily program execution in operations, merchandising, sales, training, safety and quality assurance, capital expenditures, and facilities management to impact topline and bottomline performance.
The GSC platform has evolved since its launch in 2013, with customers expressing an increasing need for real-time data visualized in ways that help busy leaders reach conclusions at a glance. Most enterprise teams generate a tremendous amount of data, but have difficulty operationalizing it, unsiloing it, or surfacing insights to drive action from it. GSC understands the need to go above and beyond traditional business intelligence and believes in continuous innovation, which is why they chose to partner with Looker to deliver advanced data experiences to their customers.
GSC’s creative use of both out-of-the-box and custom data solutions to unlock business value goes beyond traditional BI to deliver four categories of data experience, with innovative self-service models that fuel modern business intelligence, integrate insights into existing workflows, optimize existing workflows with data, and create tailored solutions with custom data applications—all powered by Looker.
An opportunity to boost customer value
Prior to implementing Looker, the GSC team used a business intelligence tool to visualize the data collected in its app by distributed teams and provide reporting for customers on the work being done. While the tool allowed customers to access basic reports and metrics, the ETL process was slow and took 6–7 hours to run. That meant customers weren’t able to access real-time insights, and analytics on KPIs typically lagged a day behind—sometimes diminishing the value of the data collected or limiting the options of recourse available if issues were found. When managing time-sensitive processes such as product recalls, GSC customers needed faster confirmation on the completion of tasks that keep consumers safe. Additionally, many customers wanted to apply their own business logic to produce meaningful insights which allowed them to manage their businesses dynamically. However, the previous BI reporting tool couldn’t incorporate custom metrics, leaving customers with a one-size-fits-all solution that didn’t represent the diverse set of challenges and opportunities they needed to navigate using data.
With GSC’s focus on quality and flexibility guiding product and engineering, the right data application platform partner needed to reflect GSC’s high product standards and commitment to achieving business impact for customers. It was critical that the next solution be highly configurable and able to flexibly integrate with GSC’s own platform. Most of all, it was important to empower the GSC team to deliver meaningful data experiences to its customers in differentiated and user-friendly ways.
“A lot of our customers operate in complex ecosystems where they have a lot going on, and with Looker we ensure that data isn’t one of the things they need to worry about.”
—Jeff Wrona, VP of Strategic Implementations, GoSpotCheckBuilding for speed, scale, and customization
After evaluating several solutions, the GSC team selected Looker because it helped solve three of its biggest technical challenges—speed, scale, and customization. With Looker, customers could explore live data directly in GSC and receive near real-time insights from distributed locations and accounts, something that wasn’t possible before. Scalability was also no longer an issue. Using Snowflake, Fivetran, and Looker, the GSC team could continue to onboard customers and provide access to insights without threatening the speed or performance of their app. This app supports data pipeline and usage from customer field teams of 10,000+ users who capture millions of photos each month, all flowing across GSC’s databases. Finally, Looker’s quick development time and endless options for building custom data experiences helped GSC deliver bespoke solutions to its customers quickly, even as their programs and objectives evolved and increased in complexity.
To ensure a fast and effective implementation of Looker, the GSC team worked with systems integrator DAS42. During the early stages of its model development, DAS42 empowered the GSC team with Looker best practices and training, and supplemented engineering resources on early builds.
“A lot of our customers operate in complex ecosystems where they have a lot going on, and with Looker we ensure that data isn’t one of the things they need to worry about. We provide the right amount of data to different levels of users in the enterprise and visualize it in the ways they want to consume it based on their role or business objectives. Being able to get the right reporting to these different layers of stakeholders provides incredible value to our customers and a serious competitive advantage,” shares Jeff Wrona, VP of Strategic Implementations at GoSpotCheck.
“It’s amazing to see what happens when we get GoSpotCheck and Looker into the hands of a business user who is motivated. They can accomplish things we wouldn’t dream of and use these platforms in ways that can set the pace of innovation for some of the biggest brands in the world.”
—Jeff Wrona, VP of Strategic Implementations, GoSpotCheckDelivering self-service with modern business intelligence
One way GSC delivers data access to customers is with modern real-time dashboards and reports integrated within its administrative platform.
A top five fast casual restaurant company empowered its franchise owners with Looker dashboards embedded within the GSC platform, and one of those owners has completely embraced the tool to improve performance at his restaurant. The owner built custom dashboards and set them to auto refresh every two minutes. He then installed large monitors in the staff service area so his frontline team members could have full visibility to the location’s performance while they worked. These dashboards display real-time visualizations that prompt team members on which tasks to complete, help them monitor logistics including the temperatures of coolers and freezers to protect food safety, and motivate them with hourly sales and customer counts throughout the day. These real-time dashboards have helped to improve the performance of this particular location well above others in the franchise, and the franchise owner has now expanded the practice to multiple locations.
“It’s amazing to see what happens when we get GoSpotCheck and Looker into the hands of a business user who is motivated. They can accomplish things we wouldn’t dream of and use these platforms in ways that can set the pace of innovation for some of the biggest brands in the world,” shares Wrona.
A timely use case that has emerged in 2020 since the COVID 19 pandemic began involves the management of cleaning and sanitation efforts at schools, hospitals, entertainment venues, and offices as they slowly reopen and adjust to the "new normal." The GSC team has used Looker to create dashboards to help organizations track, visualize, and share inspection rates across locations to ensure they’re consistently meeting safety regulations and helping keep frontline workers safe.
“Some of our facilities management innovators are starting to use Looker dashboards to provide public-facing reporting on health and safety standards for cleaning,” explains Wrona. “One of the things we believe COVID-19 will do is create consumer expectations of transparency from corporations—GSC and Looker are in a unique position to help organizations achieve transparency and demonstrate their commitment to public health and safety, which will ultimately lead to consumer trust and loyalty for the brands who take it seriously.”
In addition to helping GSC customers, the ease of building and customizing dashboards in Looker has been a huge time-saver and selling point for internal GSC teams. Wrona shares that “Our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) have embraced Looker—as soon as they started getting in there and building things, they saw how easy it was. Now, we have CSMs handling requests on a customer call, and they’re walking the customer through how to make a change in their BI models, or are able to do it for them with confidence. Before, this would have required technical labor to accomplish. Today, our Customer Success and Support teams can self-serve and meet fast-breaking customer requests in real time, which really deepens our relationship with the customers we serve.”
“Snowflake’s data scaling capabilities, combined with Looker’s data modeling and visualization expertise have really allowed us to unlock the true power of this massive dataset and create high-value aggregations based on each customer’s business logic to drive continuous innovation for our customers.”
—Jeff Wrona, VP of Strategic Implementations, GoSpotCheckIntegrating insights into existing workflows
The GSC team recognized early on that the value of Looker extends far beyond modern BI reports and dashboards. One way they realized this additional value was to integrate insights into customer workflows by embedding relevant insights into the tools and products their customers already use, providing valuable context to users to make the business more effective.
For example, the category management team at a top apparel company tracks and visualizes market position and display compliance in large retailers and then integrates those insights with additional tools to understand the white space in the market for color, fabric, and more. The flexibility of the GSC and Looker platforms help the team integrate data across systems and visualize it to drive strategy and decision-making, and proliferate insights across functions.
Recently, the GSC team has developed an integrated image recognition and task management feature set that leverages computer vision, machine learning, and Looker to bring image recognition and next-level analysis to field sales reps on their mobile phones. GSC’s integrated image recognition and digital task management feature set was initially developed to help beverage suppliers and distributors who send field teams into retail and hospitality locations to identify their product’s market share, assortment, and position within coolers and cold vaults, and on menus quickly from an image. Field teams take a photo of products in a cooler or on a menu and submit those images to be processed through proprietary machine learning models. Then, analytics about the image content are returned to the mobile device in under two minutes. GSC’s Looker-powered mobile data application provides an intuitive breakdown on the amount of product in the display, the brand’s percent of share, and the product assortment—something reps previously had to audit and calculate manually. Within a matter of seconds, field teams can see a data-driven breakdown of how their product is positioned against competitors, and if the placement meets contracted agreements with the retailer.
This feature set is being used by several global beverage brands, and the GSC team is working with human taggers to help train its proprietary algorithms to make the machine smarter in its accurate detection and recognition of products trained in its models. The GSC team also uses Looker to enable its internal managers to effectively plan and allocate human tagging resources to the most important backlogs.
“The sheer amount of data that our image recognition system is generating from a single image is quite impressive. When you consider a customer team with tens of thousands of field users, all taking 15–20 photos in each account they visit, and visiting 15–20 accounts per day, these customers are developing an extremely robust and granular dataset to use for making critical decisions—from stocking inventory to adjusting promotions—with near real-time agility. Snowflake’s data scaling capabilities, combined with Looker’s data modeling and visualization expertise, have really allowed us to unlock the true power of this massive dataset and create high-value aggregations based on each customer’s business logic to drive continuous innovation for our customers,” shares Wrona.
Integrating insights into internal processes at GoSpotCheck
In addition to infusing insights into customers’ workflows, the GSC team has gone beyond traditional informational BI reports and dashboards by using Looker to manage and track data on key internal workflows for its own business as well. By leveraging Snowflake, Fivetran, and Looker, GSC has integrated valuable CRM, Jira, Asana, and other datasets to optimize internal billing processes, project management, and customer support initiatives.
These integrations also help the GSC team understand how COVID-19 is impacting customer utilization of its platform by monitoring mission (GSC’s term for the set of tasks users complete on mobile), and user counts state-by-state to see where customers are being heavily impacted by local ordinances, closures, and market trends. This combination of high-level and granular insights integrated across applications has helped the GSC team optimize customer success initiatives and enabled the company to be a true partner to customers during a time of unprecedented disruption in their businesses. At the same time, their connected data ecosystem has also helped GSC manage its own forecast more nimbly with a data-driven approach to analyzing leading indicators that could impact ARR due to COVID-19.
Optimizing existing workflows with data
When integrating the Looker data application platform into its task execution platform, the GSC team also identified opportunities to optimize existing customer workflows by automating the decision-making process to significantly reduce and often eliminate manual intervention for field execution processes.
A common customer use case for GSC involves using the platform to help frontline team members report on what’s happening at different locations and allow corporate offices to monitor incoming results across the organization. For example, a national furniture retailer uses GSC to track in-store repair and maintenance requests and then initiate data-driven workflows when certain criteria are met. Upon identifying a need for repair or maintenance, district managers take a photo of the issue and submit it via the GSC platform that has been configured to automatically trigger an email to the company’s repair and maintenance team via Looker. This email then triggers a ticket to their work order management system. This process improved the speed and time to submit and complete work order requests which impact safety and customer experience standards. During the pilot, the data collected helped make a business case for increasing the maintenance budget to ensure that all tickets were addressed and stores could provide a first-class customer experience.
A national grocery merchandising broker relies on GSC and Looker to help its merchandisers and field sales reps optimize product placement and performance by tracking distribution, inventory, merchandising, point of purchase (POP) trade programs, and sales in thousands of grocery stores. Traditionally, brands invest tremendous resources to influence retailers to stock and feature specific products, and brokers need optimized ways to measure the ROI of promotions, displays, and merchandising services for their clients. The broker configured an alert within GSC to notify merchandisers when a particular item hasn’t been scanned at check-out within a given time period. When this condition is met, the GSC platform automatically notifies a brand representative to check on the product in the store, as well as re-engage with the location manager to identify additional high-value tasks such as upsells for that product that may have been sold out and unavailable to customers for a given time. Previously, this complex sales process was tracked manually, but now with a configured solution in the GSC platform triggering alerts and workflows, it’s much easier for the broker to identify trends and opportunities as well as ensure retailers are helping maintain appropriate stock levels for its brands.
Another customer, a top 10 consumer packaged goods brand, uses GSC to audit products as they are imported through ports of entry. Within the GSC platform, Looker powers automated alerts to flag if an inspection on an imported product fails. With these alerts, data is being used to track and trigger notifications to alert specific people who must take action if a shipment doesn’t meet standards to reduce risk, and protect brand equity.
Creating tailored solutions with custom data applications
To further help their customers optimize functions or meet a specific business objective, the GSC team also designs and develops purpose-built and fully custom data applications on Looker. These use cases require a sophisticated user experience tailored precisely to the desired data-driven user behavior they need to operationalize.
A top global spice manufacturer utilizes a custom data application powered by GSC and Looker to combine sales and product scan data from multiple systems of record to empower frontline merchandisers and sales reps with the context they need to take action directly from within the same application to increase revenue. This allows the manufacturer’s non-technical field sales teams to analyze regional sales performance alongside merchandising data. This helps them allocate labor toward the best-selling locations to ensure premium product placement in the highest volume stores and sufficient staffing to support the most strategic locations.
With purpose-built data applications, GSC helps its customers get the full context of what’s happening in their business in real time with a great user experience that transforms insight into action to produce better business outcomes.
A flexible foundation for the future
By putting customer needs first and combining the power and flexibility of Looker’s modern data application platform with its own, GoSpotCheck has delivered diverse data experiences that are transforming outcomes for category leaders on six continents.
Looking forward, GSC is driving toward continuous innovation and investing in bringing new technologies to market that will change the way teams work, for good.
“We’re reimagining how tomorrow’s workforce works. Looker is a powerful partner for us, and will continue to be because of their robust analytics capabilities, flexibility in data visualization, and integration points with numerous systems to drive powerful data apps, workflows, and alerts. Regardless of the tools we use to manage our businesses, we’ll always need powerful solutions like Looker to analyze complex and ever-changing datasets in real time so we can make decisions quickly, take the right actions at the right time, and delight our customers,” concludes Wrona.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About GoSpotCheck
GoSpotCheck is a mobile task management platform for teams that connects frontline employees with corporate goals and directives, creates a shared view of the field, and helps leaders make better decisions, faster.