Improving Apps and Streamlining Processes
Founded in 1992, CertaPro Painters® is the largest franchise painting organization in North America aiming to provide quality service to home and business owners everywhere. Currently, over 350 locally owned franchises operate in the United States and Canada, handling both residential and commercial painting jobs and providing high-quality, personalized service to each customer they work with.
Challenges
As a franchise company, CertaPro offers its franchisees numerous tools to help them run their businesses, and one of the biggest assets they provide is an application that enables franchisees to generate estimates and manage existing jobs.
Originally, CertaPro contracted with another firm to modernize their app to support both browser and mobile platforms. Once the application was migrated to its new stack, CertaPro soon began to seek out a new partner that aligned with their aims to enhance and support the platform so franchisees could get the user experience and support they’ve come to expect from CertaPro.
Having worked with Hammer Dev since 2011, they engaged the team’s expertise to help with ensuring the new application provided the experience its franchisees need in order to be successful.
Solutions
Once engaged, the Hammer Dev team assessed the application and took over its day-to-day support, releasing patches, updating the user experience, and developing enhancements requested by CertaPro leadership and franchisees.
As part of our support, we conducted User Acceptance Tests (UAT) to identify potential areas where issues might have arisen with franchisees. In the course of our UATs, our team identified multiple areas where glitches made it difficult to use the application and had a negative impact on the end-user experience. One of the biggest areas where the Hammer Dev team streamlined the process used to communicate between the mobile application and Microsoft Dynamics, resulting in a reduction in daily API calls from two million to five hundred thousand and attendant savings in synchronization times and cost. We also received feedback on the kinds of enhancements CertaPro was looking for the application to have and requested our assistance in implementing them.
The application enhancements we designed and implemented included key functions like the ability to generate proposals for commercial painting jobs, adding additional rooms to the proposals, estimating additional services beyond painting, and revamping the dashboard. However, it also included secondary functions that enabled a cleaner user experience by providing tools that would enable cleaner proposal formatting when printed and integrating the ability to search for local jobs that were performed by CertaPro professionals as examples that could be provided to customers, which they typically had to do through a secondary application.
Results
Although Hammer Dev wasn’t directly involved in the original development of the estimation application for CertaPro, our management and enhancement of the system enabled a smoother user experience and increased functionality to meet the needs of CertaPro franchisees and their diverse customer base. The inclusion of an estimation tool for commercial clients empowered franchise owners to provide estimates to more clients while the ability to search clients in the area without having to utilize a separate application to do so. With the resolution of system glitches, the application’s user experience was made significantly smoother and more accessible to the franchise owners who rely on it.
Since taking over as the primary support team for the mobile application, CertaPro leadership continues to rely on the Hammer Dev team to ensure the system runs smoothly and has planned out a list of enhancements they would like the team to develop and deploy, driving continual value for its franchisees and customers.
75%
Reduction in Daily API Calls
We’ve been working with Hammer Dev for years and when we started looking for a partner to take over the management of our franchisee estimation tool, they were the obvious choice. They have a depth of knowledge and responsiveness that makes working with them a pleasure. Hammer Dev continues to provide a high quality and valuable service across our organization, from CertaPro’s corporate management to our franchisees, and ultimately our customers.”
Rich Volp, Vice President of Business Solutions
