Client Case 18. How Does Monitoring Employee Computers Impact Profit?

Here is a real case with detailed analysis of how Kickidler’s Polish user succeeded in retaining customers and increasing the profit of his online store with the help of time tracking.

Why We Were Contacted

Our client owns an online store in Krakow dedicated to fishing equipment. Due to the pandemic, all of his employees were transferred to remote work in May 2020.

When Poland closed its borders, the popularity of local tourism increased, and accordingly, the demand for fishing gear increased as well. Our client noticed his sales numbers improving significantly, however, with them the cancellation rate rose as well. Basically, it means that potential customers who placed orders on the online store’s website began to cancel their orders more often. Before the pandemic, the cancellation rate was around 20%, but these days the rate exceeded 30%.

The reason for this troublesome trend turned out to be quite difficult to determine – pretty much as difficult as trying to catch a big fish in the murky waters of the Vistula.

Our client started analyzing the situation. The first thing he did was eliminate such possible reasons for the increase in cancellations as product availability problems, non-competitive prices, delivery costs.

You should keep in mind that fishing equipment is a commodity, which means that these products are easily interchangeable with other goods of the same type. If a customer had filed a request on the site, but later the manager didn’t call them back, didn’t provide a consultation and process their order, then that customer without a shadow of doubt would leave to competitors who have the exact same product at a similar price, yet whose salespeople are more efficient.

Hence, the most likely reason for the increase in cancellation numbers could be a decline in productivity among employees who weren’t accustomed to working from home. To test this hypothesis, the storeowner decided to install Kickidler software on his employees’ computers.

Below is the data for 6 managers working in the sales department one month prior to the implementation of Kickidler. Automated sales that didn’t require consultation accounted for 25% of the total sales and were evenly distributed among all employees. The average cancellation rate was around 30%.

How Kickidler Was Implemented

With our help, the client implemented time-tracking software Kickidler. Prior to that, he notified his employees about the software’s installation and provided a transparent description of how it operated. 

Following our advice, fist of all, he conducted an evaluation and classification of all the sites and applications that were being used throughout the company. CRM system, e-mail, messengers, accounting software, software for calls, company website as well as educational sites on fishing and competitors’ sites were marked as productive. All other sites and apps were labeled as either neutral or unproductive.

The second step was to set up automatic notifications, which are part of the functionality of our Autokick.

Employees are legally entitled to a one-hour break per day and three short 15-minute breaks. And Kickidler productivity calendar’s functionality came in hand to distribute everybody’s lunch breaks in such a way that there would always be an employee present at the workplace.

If an employee were to be inactive for 15 minutes, they’d receive an automatic notification with the following text, “You have been inactive for 15 minutes. Remember that you may take a short break like this one no more than three times a day.” In the report on notifications, the supervisor is able to see the amount of such breaks per day.

Would you call such behavior “micromanagement”? No! It's purely a market requirement.

The third step was to install Kickidler’s Viewer onto the head of sales department’s computer, since that person was in charge of allocating leads and they needed to be able to see what every employee was doing at certain moments. That action helped improve the distribution of urgent leads (orders), since they were now delegated to less busy managers, for example, to those who weren’t on the phone with a client at that moment.

The aforementioned step resulted in both an improved control of the employees and a more effective distribution of leads.

With the beginning of the fishing season, the number of orders increased, all while the cancellation rate decreased to 22%. And that’s the result our client got after just one week of using Kickidler. 

However, monitoring working hours indicated that even after implementing Kickidler, managers weren’t able to completely give up the habit of distracting themselves from work with unproductive sites and taking more breaks than they were supposed to.

This issue was addressed at the staff meeting. One-on-one talks were held with the most vicious procrastinators.

In the midst of the fishing season, the overall cancellation rate improved even more, reaching almost 15%. These numbers were even better than the ones the company had before the pandemic, and they were achieved even despite the fact that a new employee had joined the department and his working process was rather slow for the time being. The correlation between the decrease in cancellations and the increase in employee productivity also became apparent.

Here are the online store’s stats during early October, which may be considered peak season for fishing.

How The Profit From Implementing Kickidler Is Calculated

And now comes the most important part. Let’s calculate how the company’s profit increased after the implementation of software to monitoring employees Kickidler.

Let’s assume that Average Order Value (AOV) for the store is €50, which is a completely randomly chosen number.

120 leads per day equal an average of €6,000 in revenue. Let’s suppose that the net profit of this revenue is 30%.

30% of 600 equals 1,800. 

€1,800 would be a net profit with zero cancellation rate, but since the cancellation rate is 30, we subtract 30%. 

1,800 minus 30% equals 1,260.

€1,260 is the net profit with 30% cancellation rate. Now let’s make the same calculations for 15%.

1,800 minus 15% equals 1,530.

That is, €270 per day would’ve been saved by implementing the time-tracking system.

Multiply this number by 30 days and you get €8,100 extra revenue per month.

And our calculations didn’t even account for Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

How much does a month of monitoring six employees with remote worker monitoring software Kickidler cost?

• €10 – if you buy three-year licenses,
• €49 – if you buy one-month licenses.

The benefits are obvious; all you have to do is choose the right strategy!