One of the main problems the real estate market faces is the high rate of unfavorable responses that companies deliver to consumers. In Chile during 2016, the cases that were not admitted and not answered represented 62%, well over the average of the rest of the markets. According to the website Diario Pyme, in the first semester of 2016, Chile’s National Consumer Service (SERNAC) received approximately 3.500 claims against the real estate market, eight in the highest amount of cases.
Most claims against construction companies are proposing nothing else than a change in the relationship with the customers, closer, more productive and satisfying. Facing this disjunctive, quality control checklists can turn into an opportunity, and supply valuable solutions thanks to the new mobile technologies.
With apps such as DataScope, quality control checklists can be easily created to check the quality of different products and services. In the construction industry for example, before delivering a house or an apartment, a quality control form can be created to check that doors, paint, electric circuits, etc. are in order. If there is a problem, an alert is sent through the smartphone for the company to fix it before its delivery.
The key of quality control checklists is that they are 100% adaptable to the clients’ needs depending on the trade they are applied to, with the additional advantage of instant access to it at all times; all it’s needed is to have the cellphone in hand. Thanks to these quality control checklists, the work can be verified with GPS location, date and time, and it also has a chat line to improve the execution and reduce the reaction time.
Customers’ claims over quality failures in products or services can cause major disadvantages to companies. In the future, mobile quality control checklists will solve instantly and effectively this kind of claims before they happen, from real estate to installation and repair of telephone lines, to name a few examples.
As a first step if you want to créate your own mobile form to solve quality control problems your company might be facing, here’s a checklist with 14 guidelines to follow for mobile input field, provided by Nielsen Norman Group:
Should it be there at all
- Is this field absolutely necessary?
Description
- Is the label above it? (Not inside, not below)
- Is the field marked as required (*) or optional?
- Have you removed any placeholder from inside the field?
Visibility
- Is the field big enough so that most possible field values are visible?
- Is the field visible in both orientations when the keyboard is displayed?
Filling it in for the user
- Do you have any good defaults for this field?
- Any history available?
- Frequently used values?
- Can you use the phone features (camera, GPS, voice, contacts ) to populate it?
- Can you compute it for the user based on other info (e.g., state based on zip code, coupon field)?
Typing
- Do you support copy & paste into the field?
- What is the right keyboard for this field?
- Can you make suggestions/autocomplete based on the first letters typed?
- Do not autocorrect for names, addresses and email addresses.
- Do you allow typos or abbreviations?
- Do you allow users to enter it in whatever format they like? (e.g., phone numbers credit cards)
- You can autoformat it for them.
It’s not necessary to complete each one of these guidelines, but the more are covered, the higher the usability for users will be.
