Saleboat – Balancing Information and Privacy

“With Great Power comes great responsibility” – Stan Lee. There is always a fine line when dealing with data, what is sufficient in creating an effective picture from which to improve service and productivity, and what is just intrusive.

This is a question the decision makers at Kusasa have to ask on a regular basis and is something we’ve kept at the top of our minds since Saleboat was first discussed. How do we get the information managers want while protecting the privacy and security of the sales people they manage? We think our solution is one of the best.

We have previously discussed how Saleboat keeps track of where people are. Saleboat knowing somebody’s location provides significant potential productivity benefits, since client details are also available, Saleboat can tell a sales person what’s close by at any time. Saleboat also uses location to automate the recording of meeting details. In both these instances, a user is giving Saleboat explicit permission to check where they are in order to improve their work flow.

Now for the tricky part, managers would like to know that their sales people are getting to the meetings they are supposed to attend, and that they are at the right place at the right time. We decided from day one that Saleboat is not just an app that’s going to follow your every move and draw lines on a map. Constant location tracking can be invasive and doesn’t really give managers the information they need. We refined the idea of location services and put forward the idea of collecting the information at the right times – when it’s relevant to the performance of the sales person.

Locating a userWhat it actually does: Location is logged when checking into a meeting and compared to where users are expected to be, the data is accessible to managers in real time and at all times, but if a user isn’t checking in as expected, or something strange is going on, Saleboat gives management a tool to get a clearer picture of what is going on. Managers may request the location of a user’s device, the device will then return the location to the manager, showing the location as an address and on a map. This function is strictly controlled, a manager can only do so if the user is in-fact a subordinate as defined in the Saleboat management hierarchy and every user has defined working hours, outside of which, the location request will be refused. Users are also alerted to the fact that they are being tracked any time a manager user this functionality.

In summary, Saleboat clearly collects all the location data a company needs to optimise their sales without having sales people feel like they constantly have someone looking over their shoulders. The platform is there to help make every person’s role more effective.

As an added bonus, Saleboat does not need much mobile data to run and devices running Saleboat do not have any additional battery life concerns, because we’re only collecting data when it matters. Saleboat is a finely-tuned precision machine, not just a brute.