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Business Challenge
The need to support a network of over 150,000 freelance business analysts or “mystery
shoppers” all over the country maximizes the value of technology for our customer’s
business. A software system for managing marketing programs for different clients,
and collecting surveys filled by analysts online was crucial to succeed in the market.
However, our customer was not completely satisfied with the services provided by
the previous offshore software development supplier. At that point, they made a
decision to try Axmor’s .Net development services based on our professional and
sound proposal.
Software Solution
For over 2 years, Axmor has been providing custom software development and support
services for our customer. Our .Net programmers have
continued the development of a software solution that
helps our customer administer large-scale customer experience management programs.
The software system is a multi-tiered application that allows the user to manage
surveys, customers and employees, and provides web access for surveys and reports.
Axmor’s .Net programmers have completed several major software updates, developed
an interactive web site, and continually extended software functionality. Upon customer
request, we regularly add new survey forms by translating text documents into SQL
scripts used by the web-form generating engine.
The main challenge encountered by Axmor’s .Net programmers at the first phase was
low system performance. Through research, our programmers found
hidden system bottlenecks and resolved this problem by:
- Optimizing the database structure
- Raising the effectiveness of stored procedures by several times
- Recommending migration to SQL Server 2000 from the earlier version, which raised
the speed of some procedures and reduced the development cost for our customer.
Customer Experience Survey Application Functionality
After several development iterations, the software provides a convenient interface
for all major business operations of the mystery shopping agency:
- Role-based access permission for business analysts, clients, project leaders, and
developers.
- Flexible client access permission management for different positions in a client’s
organizational structure.
- “Mystery shoppers” can apply for the job and complete evaluation surveys online.
- Logical web surveys that redirect users to the next question based on their previous
response.
- Different response types: multiple choice and open comments.
- Each question has its weight, and the total grade is calculated for each survey
accordingly.
- A number of survey reports are available for clients and company employees on the
web. The developed application supplies appropriate data for the third-party report
generation software, Actuate Server, which returns reports in .pdf format.
- Accuracy of the completed survey is checked, saving immeasurable time for our customer’s
project leaders.
- Rules can be formulated for surveys to generate email alerts, for example: when
negative feedback is received during a survey. At the moment, rules can be formulated
only by programmers, but in the next software update, this feature will be available
for non-technical users.
Because the real software environment is very complex, ongoing changes are implemented
on the customer side through remote connection to the Citrix Server to avoid extra
development cost.
Axmor’s developers release all software accompanied by our User Guides for
our customer’s internal use in addition to comprehensive Development Guides
that allow our customer to continue development in-house.
Although Axmor’s hourly rate is higher than the previous supplier’s, our customer
finds it profitable to use our services. According to our customer’s project manager,
the effectiveness and skills of our .Net programmers translate to low total
development costs. We started our collaboration with our client from
simple programming with clearly defined specifications. And now, our customer entrusts
new software updates, design, and development entirely to Axmor.
The goal of Axmor’s current project is to fully automate survey generation and reduce
our customer’s time and money spent on manual SQL script development. Axmor also
has a leading role in one of our customer’s most complex projects: the development
of a common data exchange standard for the International Mystery Shopping Alliance.
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BRIEF:
Development and support of the web application that
supports online survey completion and reporting for the customer experience management
service provider.
BENEFITS:
- High programming effectiveness resulting in low development costs;
- High software performance, low rate of defects, and thorough documentation;
- User-friendly interface.
TECHNOLOGIES:
- .NET
- ASP/ASP.NET
- Windows Service Application
- VC++/VB
- MS SQL Server 7.0/2000
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