Featured Case Study

Close-line

The close-line.com team has spent the last 20+ years in sales and sales leadership roles, having witnessed many people forge extraordinary careers and become senior executives and business leaders. Because strong and sustainable skills in the field of sales is a crucial building block of high performance business people, organisations will always value that. The aim of close-line.com is to provide a good understanding of how great sales people communicate and assist those wanting to build a career in sales.

URL:
www.close-line.com

Customer’s Problem:

Our client wanted to have a website with questions and answers for sales professionals. The client himself is a sales person with extensive experience. So, he wanted to share his experiences through questions and answers format with the world and also wanted to respond to the universal problems other sales people were facing. Our client desired to solve their problems by answering the questions.

Customer Interaction:

• After interaction with the client, our developers came up with the idea of the having a website for three different kinds of users with defined access to the questions and answers.
• We planned to have a separate page for individual users (who could post questions and replies), organizations’ admin, and organizations’ members.
• The organization page with queries and replies would not be viewed by the individual users and vice versa for security reasons.
• We also had to prepare payment methods for the organizations’ users.
• We aimed to build a website that would be user friendly and can be easily managed by the users independently.

Solution Offered to Client:

• In the software solution we offered, the organization admin could create an account himself and get an organization admin dashboard access.
• The organization could send request to other members of the organization to join or register with close-line.com via email. They could ask questions, answer them, vote up and down for the answers.
• They could chat with the organization members and organization admin, follow the members etc.
• We used Payflow recurring (of PayPal) payment method. After the free membership period was over, the organization admin could purchase membership.
• The individual members could ask questions, view other questions, filter them based on number of likes, recent questions, gender, age group, etc.
• A new type of user called ‘Reseller’ was later added to the system.
• There are 3 types of performance sheet based on asked question, answer the question, voted up and down the questions for the last 7 days. Individual report, country-wise performance, country-wise individual performance. Those are for individual and organization (This part will show to the org admin and org members only).
• Another type of user was added, that is ‘Job Providers’ for advertising jobs on the page.They could register in close-line.com and post about the job openings. Individual members could apply for the posted jobs.

Technology We Used:

• Web server: Apache 2.4.18
• Framework: Codeigniter 2
• Database: MySQL 5.6.40
• JQuery, Ajax and Cron jobs 2.5.0
• Operating system - Linux
• Payment gateway - Payflow

Final Benefit:

• After the website was developed from scratch, it got almost 10,000 members, 1500 questions and nearly 2000 answers for its usability and visual appeal.
• Those 10,000 members are from 80 different countries which means it could attract members globally by satisfying their sales queries.
• Most of the members of the close-line.com are very active users because they get ample knowledge about their subject, which was the aim of the client.
• Close-line.com is being enriched on frequent basis to keep it updated and popular.