Once upon a time…
…there was a company that owned many childcare centers around the country. Every center had a director, an assistant director, many teachers, and an average of about 125 families in each center.
Every day…
…each director spent between 4 and 6 hours on tasks that did not grow or help their business. Both the directors and assistant directors spent too much time working on administrative tasks rather than helping the parents, teachers, and children. They wanted to spend more time with their customers. Instead, they spent time on paperwork and administration.
One day…
…the company realized they had no idea how to help their employees improve their own situations. In order to come up with a good plan, the company needed to understand where the employees were spending their time. But they had no method of collecting data to start the process.
Because of that…
…we suggested a convenient way for them to track how much time they spent on their daily chores. What if we could build a fun-to-use, gamified mobile app that would help them track the time they spent every day on every task? The mobile app would have to be fast and straightforward. It would have to run on every type of mobile device, rewarding the users in fun ways to keep them engaged.
And because of that…
…we designed and built a cross-platform mobile app for collecting the time each director and assistant director spent on each of their tasks. Every day the app would remind them to enter that day’s schedule. The app would ask them, for example, how much time they spent checking people into their centers and taking attendance. The data entry each day took less than 60 seconds and was fun to use. The mobile app would reward them with fun prizes and new level-up capabilities for entering consistently. We developed the app to gamify the data collection so that the company would have the information needed to make better decisions. The data collected would then feed into the corporate data warehouse to be used in analytics and machine learning algorithms for analysis and model building.
Until finally…
…everyone that used the app enjoyed using it. The mobile app is ready to help the company understand the many places it could eliminate wasted time and effort. With tens of thousands of data points, we can build predictive models that could help change behaviors for much better customer experiences. And this cross-platform mobile game is the first step in that process.