The Business Problem
Send My Bag™ approached Etain with a need to develop a means of supplementing the services already in existence on their website by providing a complimentary, real-time status or tracking application that would also function as a direct B2C communication interface.
The objective of the Send My Bag™ Companion App project was to offer customers the opportunity to keep track of their bags from when their order was placed right through to the bag delivery at its intended destination.
With consumers evermore digitised and frustrated with 'closed-door' service providers, Send My Bag™ recognised that in order to maintain the focus and customer loyalty of their target market, they would have to invest in mobile technology. In this case an easily accessible application that gifts back some of the control to the consumer by offering insight into the process and keeping them in touch along the journey, and all while moving to innovate the services industry they occupy.
The Transformation
The Send My Bag™ mobile application would be a companion application for the website designed to run on both the IOS and Android platforms, ensuring optimum market reach. The app would allow users to login to their account and complete a range of processes from tracking the status of their bag shipment to viewing rewards earned and managing account information.
Developed using Xamarin, our custom application delivered a cross-platform solution with the facility to intuitively target iOS and Android. This enabled our developers to write the back-end code once in C# and share it between each platform partnered with separate user interfaces. By implementing a Xamarin and C# together our developers were able to essentially compile two native apps delivering the best performance and access that played to each of the platforms specific features.
While primarily developed so that customers with either operating system or mobile devices could use the application to track their orders placed on the website, as an added benefit, harnessing the power of social media, our custom application incorporated a rewards scheme whereby customers could earn rewards simply by sharing their 'Send My Bag' experiences via Facebook and Twitter.
From the dashboard users can choose to navigate the app through a standard menu structure or through a series of push notifications, in-app pop-ups, and ‘Call-to-Action’ content built in to the dashboard alerting users to the most recent status update of the their order. Our custom application for Send My Bag essentially delivers a top level 'at a glance' service whereby users can learn the exact status of their bags at any point in the order process, with the minimum of effort required.