BARC India boosts field service productivity by 25% with automation

BARC India is a statistical and measurement science company which is ‘Of the Industry, By the Industry and For the Industry’. 

The company is registered with the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) as a joint industry body (JIB) that provides the most authentic audience estimates of “What India Watches” to broadcasters, advertisers and advertising agencies. The big-data-driven insights generated by BARC India are built upon a robust and future-ready technology backbone which powers efficient media spends and content decisions in a highly dynamic and growing broadcasting sector.  

Having commenced operations in 2015, BARC now manages one of the world’s largest and most diverse TV measurement systems.

Need to unify field service and inventory management on one platform for better efficiency

Since BARC’s insights power the Rs 32,000 crore TV ad industry, they need to be transparent, accurate, and inclusive. As the first step in that direction, BARC has developed a robust research methodology. 

Using statistical sampling, the company carefully surveys, recruits, and measures a panel of TV-viewing households from across India. Data is collected from these participants through special TV set metering devices.  

The challenge lies in managing these devices – all 55,000+ of them. Not only do they have to be installed in a new household every time a panel is refreshed (once in four years) – but they also must be monitored regularly for connectivity, device maintenance issues, and updates in household details. 

If a device malfunctions due to extreme weather conditions or power failures, it needs to be proactively repaired before data collection is impacted. Moreover, the household it’s installed in has to be surveyed every six months to check for demographic changes which can alter TV viewing behaviours.

Managing and monitoring all this field work and panel data at scale requires an integrated approach.

“Previously, our CRM was managed on Salesforce, while our field service was managed on ClickSoftware,” says Nitish Kumar, SVP-Technology, BARC India. “We wanted a more unified solution – so, we consolidated our entire service cycle on Salesforce. 

“What appealed to us about the platform was its adaptability, as well as its large developer and partner ecosystem.”

An integrated service platform provides a unified view of panel and inventory data

With Salesforce Service Cloud, BARC has built a comprehensive iPMS (integrated panel management system) that streamlines the recruitment, onboarding, and monitoring of TV viewing panels. All panel CRM data is captured in a single view, providing quality inputs for audience measurement. 

Service Cloud also doubles up as BARC’s inventory management system, delivering real-time visibility into the 55,000+ metering devices installed across households. Teams can easily monitor the journey of each device – from the warehouse, to the deployment location, to the service centre for repairs, and so on

Automation improves field service productivity, expanding coverage to 20% more panel households

Third-party analytics detect when a device sets off an alarm – or, when a household demographic check is required. These insights flow into Service Cloud within BARC’s contact centre, where service actions are efficiently scheduled and allocated to the right field executives. 

Using the Salesforce Field Service app, field executives can fulfil service orders smarter and faster. With maps, they can automatically calculate the shortest field service routes. But since panel confidentiality is so critical, the system doesn’t reveal the panel’s household addresses even to the field executive. Instead, it guides them step-by-step to the nearest landmark till they reach the designated location. Once the service is complete, all location details are automatically erased from the app to protect the panel’s confidentiality. 

Onsite, field executives can easily capture changes to household demographics, manage installations, and coordinate device maintenance through their field service app. Meanwhile, dispatchers at the contact centre can closely track the status of the field work in real time to ensure that everything is progressing as scheduled. 

“By streamlining and automating field service, we’ve seen significant gains in productivity,” says Mahendra Upadhyay, CIO, BARC. “The same team of 650 field executives can conduct 15% more panel visits per day, and visit 20% more households.” 

“Leveraging Salesforce’s scalability, we’ve designed the solution to cater to a panel size of up to 300,000 households.”

Timely insights on panel and device health power operational excellence

BARC uses Tableau to draw out rich insights from its data lake. Teams can easily track metrics like abnormal viewership patterns (deviations from typical TV viewing behaviours) and data lake ingestion status (analysis of data intake volumes to detect missing or duplicate entries). 

Tableau also enables daily operations monitoring to track the performance and connectivity of metering devices. 

“Tableau’s insights on panel health and data quality are integral to decision-making at the top management level,” says Kumar. “We currently have 16-17 different dashboards for operations alone.”

To implement these and other Salesforce solutions, BARC relied on the consulting expertise of Manras Technologies. 

“Given that our use of Salesforce is quite unique, Manras did a fantastic job with the implementation,” says Upadhyay. “Together with Salesforce and our in-house teams, they meticulously identified and crafted each use case, ironing out multiple challenges, and ensuring that the platform works the way we need it to.”

Next: Use AI to anticipate device failures, and encryption to protect data

BARC is now keen to explore how Salesforce’s Agentforce can be used to predict when a device is likely to malfunction or fail, so that it can be fixed proactively i.e., before data collection is impacted. 

BARC India has also implemented Salesforce Shield to encrypt sensitive data, and strengthen regulatory compliance. 

From a strategic perspective, BARC plans to expand its audience measurement capabilities beyond TV into other types of media, while also improving operational efficiency.  

“I envision BARC operating with more nimbleness and agility,” says Upadhyay. “Using technology, we hope to do twice or thrice the amount of work that we do today.”

BARC has used Salesforce in quite an innovative way, building an integrated panel and inventory management system that delivers reliable data inputs. Together with field service automation, these capabilities are helping the company improve the quality of audience measurement.