Facewatch drives sales with client reports

As one of the UK’s leading facial recognition companies, Facewatch’s cloud-based facial recognition security system safeguards their subscribers’ staff, customers and businesses against crime. Fully GDPR compliant, Facewatch has been servicing primarily retailers across the UK for more than 11 years to prevent crime before it happens.

Facewatch delivers performance reports to clients and investors on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Thus, a reporting system that communicates information to clients in a clear, convenient way is of primary importance to the company.

We wanted to send professional looking reports to our customers monthly to replace sending spreadsheets attached to emails or powerpoints using data from Excel. The reports are a vital part of ensuring customers see the benefits of using the system on a regular basis.

Facewatch uses GRID first and foremost as a means to create easily shareable, customized reports, but the major points of value GRID fosters have grown beyond ease of reporting. Simon Gordon, Facewatch’s CEO, explains that GRID has generated significant value for the company in terms of the increased customer interaction it has enabled. 

Facewatch leverages their regular GRID reports to reinforce tangible benefits to their clients and keep these points top of mind. The appeal of interactive features like GRID’s slider allows Facewatch to highlight the advantages of increasing a particular client’s number of stores, for example, and the amount of savings those clients could potentially garner. For Facewatch, GRID has become a sales tool – not simply a reporting tool.

Searching for solutions

Prior to discovering GRID, Facewatch used a combination of Excel, Word, PDFs, and email to produce their client reports – a process that presented a number of problems.

Facewatch’s clients were receiving their monthly analysis in spreadsheets sent via email. This format provided no narrative for the client, and although the company’s dashboard system contained the pertinent information, clients didn’t interact with that system regularly. Facewatch therefore needed to extract and convey key data and messages to save their busy clients valuable time and effort. 

We used to create all of our reports by working between Excel, Microsoft Word and then exporting them to PDF. Whenever we’d get feedback from our clients, we would have to go back in and edit the documents and re-export everything.

Making the switch

Simon first came across GRID while doing online research to find a solution for Facewatch’s reporting challenges, and subsequently became one of GRID’s earliest adopters. Particularly impressed by the professional looking results he was able to achieve with GRID, Simon also realized there was considerable value to be found in the improved customer service that GRID could facilitate.

The end result looks really professional, it enables real time updates and it renders brilliantly on mobiles.

Once Facewatch switched over to GRID for their reporting services, Simon says he noticed the impact of GRID’s unique benefits immediately. “[GRID is] unique in the way it provides the UI through a browser and enables me to adjust reports on the fly if a customer asks for more information. Now, we just send [clients] links to GRID documents which are always kept up to date!” he explains. 

Looking to the future

As a successfully growing business, Facewatch continues to identify opportunities to  improve efficiency and upgrade customer experience. Simon has his eye on a few ideas that he believes will support the company on its rapid course of expansion. These include automated processes and increased interactivity built in to Facewatch’s customer portal, allowing customers to generate standard GRID reports at any time. 

When asked whether he would recommend GRID for small business owners, Simon is very positive. “Definitely” he says – “it’s simple to use and affordable compared to the over-complex business intelligence systems or usual old Powerpoint presentations.”  He is also pleased with the ease of graphing with GRID in comparison to his experience using Excel. Simon has been enthusiastic about GRID’s excellent customer support as well - a facet of communication that he has often remarked on.  

The relationship between Facewatch and GRID is proving to be both beneficial and evolving, with many exciting potential developments on both sides. There is little doubt that Simon’s experience has played a key role in helping GRID develop as a product – and he is certainly looking forward to what will come next. 

The finished result is so clean and lovely looking. The team behind it are bright and respond to questions and suggestions  very fast... I know it’s just going to get better and better.

- Simon Gordon, CEO of Facewatch