Trakee
Introduction
Trakee was introduced as a product which serves as an online platform for SME businesses to enable operational transparency with regards to customer orders, so that customers can appreciate and understand the value and effort which goes into obtaining services. The founder of Trakee, understood the pain point behind businesses that adopt no operational transparency. When people wish to obtain any kind of service, there is a certain waiting time for the service to be processed and it is a known fact that people hate to wait. So the Trakee team wanted to find a way to notify people about the status of their service orders. Whether you give a suit to the dry cleaners, or order a pizza, a bit of waiting time is needed to get the task done. It also gets frustrating if there is a delay. Delays mostly likely occur due to external, uncontrollable factors such as weather and accidents or simply due to lack of organization. The team also realized that if businesses had a system in place to inform customers about any predicted delays, customers are more likely to be understanding and patient.
Challenge
Based on a study from Harvard Business School, customers were more likely to be patient when they are updated with the work that goes behind the scenes and are provided with reasons for the waiting time and delay. So if companies update their customers about the status of their order, they will be more likely to wait and value the service more. But why don’t most businesses update their customers? It’s because the manual effort of managing a large amount of orders is complicated and exhausting. It is difficult to update customers and manage their orders at the same time because most businesses don't have the proper resources, systems and technology to communicate with customers effectively. Once the team conducted our market research, they recognized that businesses wanted to provide a way to bring forward operational and location transparency for their products and services while seeking strategies to increase sales.
Solution
After taking into account the challenges faced, Trakee Management was developed, a SAAS product that helps service-based SME businesses to enhance their operational and location transparency to build a better customer experience. Trakee is an incubated product from Rootcode Labs, where Rootcode assisted in accelerating the creation of this product, and thereby helped streamline the workflow of companies and digitize their customer interactions and experience. Trakee is an order management and customer communication tool for SME businesses where businesses can add and manage their orders and update the customers about the order status through an SMS. Customers are updated about their order statuses such as location of the order in real-time along with the notification of any delays which enhances customer satisfaction. Companies are also provided with the opportunity to integrate Trakee to their existing systems or use any new systems with Trakee. Be it project and task management systems, POS and CRM systems or appointment management systems. More of Trakee’s features include the ability to send digital invoices to customers and the opportunity to receive feedback and reviews from customers.
Impact
With Trakee, businesses are able to update their customers about the order status effectively. This online platform enabled SME businesses to easily add and manage orders and update customers simultaneously. Trakee enhanced operational visibility to customers and enabled people to provide feedback on the orders received. With this feedback Trakee was further configured to help companies deliver the best customer service possible. Customers who are provided with operational and location transparency had a feeling of getting a high quality service and enhanced willingness to pay. They also trusted that these companies had more expertise and were more thorough when it came to providing services. Moreover, employees got more job satisfaction and were motivated to put in more effort when they recognized that their work is made transparent. Trakee also gives the opportunity for businesses to send digital invoices to customers. In comparison to paper invoices, these digital invoices decrease paper waste and help in reducing the carbon footprint. It is also easy for customers to keep track of digital invoices which means businesses are likely to get paid quickly and the errors of sending wrong invoices are minimized.