Jessica Laporte
December 20, 2014
The Kouzin Dlo app was built using the CommCare interface. CommCare is a mobile health app that was built for mobile health workers to track cases and share educational messaging, on a variety of medical needs, over time. Kouzin Dlo is utilizing this platform to track both sales agents and customers who interact with out business.
If we were just a business about making money, simple accounting and stock management would suffice, but Kouzin Dlo is about improving health by increasing access to clean water while creating economic opportunities for women in their communities. We want to be able to track our impact in these three areas – job creation, access to clean water and health. In order to do that we need to know the history of our sales agents over time as well as be able to track customers and follow-up with them through monitoring activities over the coming years.
What’s in the Kouzin Dlo App?
Tracking Sales Agents
Community Hub
4 training sessions, 12.5 hrs and endless examples later, our three community managers are trained and using our new CommCare app to record their site activities. Everything from accounting and stock management to work reports and bi-weekly meeting attendance are moving from paper to digital over the coming month. For these first 4 weeks all records with be kept electronically and on paper in order to catch manual mistakes as well as glitches in the app. But come mid-January, good-bye printing and 3-hole punching, hello Excel reports.
As excited as I am about the destination - remote data collection with real time updates – the journey to launching this new app has been eye opening. It was a learning process for all of us. I had to learn how to see phones in a totally new way in order to just explain how to swipe from screen to screen or find a menu.
Over the past four weeks I’ve gotten to see our managers not only learn how to use the app and fill out the eight different forms, but also learn how to use touch screens for the first time. In the end the most rewarding moment was watching one of my mangers navigate a new form without instructions to register a sales agent in the field, putting together her new knowledge of how to operate the app and phone with a new set of questions.
At the onset of this process it was all green lights and possibilities. Now I’m seeing the challenges of keeping-up a mobile data collection system – from keeping phones charged to checking data usage to ensure these work phones stay work phones. Ultimately, Kouzin Dlo has continued down this path because there truly are doors to grown and expansion that will only be possible through a tool like this that not only improves the quantity, but the quality and speed of information we can collect on our sites, sales agents and eventually customers. In fact, this new app may be the key to measuring the social impacts of our clean water business over the coming year by allowing us to track sales agents and customers overtime.
