Interview Testimonial with Manil Bangera

Introducing Manil Bangera, Senior Manager, Key Accounts Management at SMS Integrated Services Pvt. Ltd. shares his company's success story with Proptor's digital solutions.

In this interview, Manil dives deep into how Proptor transformed their daily operations. Gone are the days of manual processes and paper trails. Now, SMS leverages Proptor's streamlined tools for data-driven decision-making.

Manil tells it all: the initial hurdles, the incredible results, and the key Proptor platforms that helped them achieve increased efficiency.

A: Things were pen-paper based. Our decisions were largely based on assumptions, or people’s understanding of the situations. There were no data driven insights to back these assumptions. However, with Proptor coming in, our daily activities are digitized. Today, our confidence has gone up so high that our top management can strongly claim how operations are streamlined with multiple checklists that we’ve adopted.

Be it inspection checklist, digital checklist, visit checklist, supervisor checklist under one roof, I can get an overview plus break down of information of how my facilities are performing in real time, across the country with the click of a button. That I think is the massive power of going digital and staying data focused. No more chances of human error!

Our MMR (monthly management report) that is sent to our customer and stakeholders started to cover various aspects of our activities through digital data that is now available. Proptor has been able to capture almost 40% of our activities. Now my operations manager doesn’t spend 4-5 hours collating information for the report and significantly saves time. Some of our initial challenges centred around adoption of technology. Since the average age of our ground staff was nearly 35-40yrs, we weren’t sure if they would take to the paperless format. They surprised everyone by following the brief that if you can click selfies and operate WhatsApp, you can use Proptor.

And seeing the progress and the support from the entire Proptor team especially Shubham, our management was also keen to digitize as many tasks as possible like photo sharing, rewards and recognition, new initiatives, Minutes of meeting and more to be covered.

A: We started with Inspections initially. At present, nearly 40-45% of our sites are using Proptor. And 60% of our key sites are Proptor enabled. Almost 2000 of our sites are using Proptor monthly and quarterly checklists. After that we have deployed SoS in over 570 sites that streamlined operations for us and simplified a lot of decision making. Thirdly, we have deployed a feedback system. This has helped our CSAT process. Earlier it used to be a manual process but has completely gotten digitized now.

What I’ve realized is that when we pitch technology to our clients, we see an increased interest in our services.

A:  Proptor came in at a time when everyone in our industry was just picking up on technology but very few were utilizing it. So, when we made presentations on how Proptor would help them ramp up efficiency levels by showing them the functionalities of the app, it instantly built a competitive edge for us. Pen and paper checklists get replaced with a digital checklist, communication becomes digital as we give you QR codes that documents all messages and escalations. And a feedback module that improves CSAT scores.

With this approach, we found that we were able to win more contracts, sustain terminations and strengthen our customer relationships. In fact, we have found that our clients also win a lot of appreciation during their appraisals or team meetings for transitioning from pen and paper to a digital format. Like one of our clients who practices sustainability speaks of our initiative as it is digital and sustainable and saves printing paper.

So, overall, it is something that every client wants today and going paperless is the order of the future.

A: Oh! We have a mix of industries like club houses, hospitals, large office spaces and more.  I would say they are diligently using all the Proptor modules that we have offered them and constantly come back with suggestions and keep asking for more functionalities that we plan to introduce.

A: Since a large base of users are ground staff from different parts of the country and stationed in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities, they often face poor network connection. Some of the establishments, especially hospitals, have underground/basement facilities that face network issues. So, internet connection emerged as an operational issue in many facilities. That’s when Proptor introduced the offline format. You fill the details in offline mode and when you are in a well network zone, the data gets saved as soon as you sync it.

From our standpoint, we faced deployment issues with establishments that have multiple retail branches. Manually onboarding each set-up or assigning checklists became difficult. That’s when Proptor introduced the bulk upload function that simplified our operations. So, we had solutions from the user standpoint and deployment side as well.

So, I keep coming back to Shubham with suggestions on what’s happening in the industry, new initiatives by other organizations in this space.

A: Our deployment strategies are clearly laid out. On-ground deployments are conducted by my operations team. We have made multiple screen recordings of using different modules. Whenever any user gets stuck and reaches out, I share with them the relevant recordings.

My next goal is to create a library and upload all of them so that anybody can access them anytime and the resolution period is further reduced.

A: The analytical part came into play when we started using CSAT and SoS. When we analysed our CSAT scores, we realized which clients are rating us a certain score and why. It instantly gave us insights on areas that we needed to improve upon and the ones that are exceeding client expectations. So, overall, it helped us understand how each of our clients rate us on the 24 parameters that we have set together.

Each parameter has a benchmark and falling under the mark would impact client relations. With the help of Proptor, it has helped us on how to ramp up our efforts for certain clients on certain parameters and what not to focus on depending on the score. This has led to reduced termination notices and has further strengthened our stakeholder partnerships. I get these reports with the click of a button that helps me make data driven decisions.

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A: At this stage, I find the Proptor team very competitive. My only suggestion is that they should explore more functionalities around Analytics, study competition, use business intelligence to add more value to the existing app. Since our customers are always looking at what’s new, it would be nice to create some magic continuously to keep up the bar.