Enable Vocal for for microfinance using Mobile Call Center Solution

Microfinance, as an industry, has seen rapid growth in the last few years. First, Let’s understand this term “Microfinance” – Microfinance refers to microloans and it is a type of banking service provided to individuals or groups of people who don’t have access to traditional banking services. In simple words, the microfinance industry caters to the low-income or unemployed population of the country. This industry targets a completely different set of audience with limited resources and mostly operating in rural areas. But, Micro financial institutions also require a proper communication strategy to achieve goals and increase the customer base.

Communication strategy plays a vital role for consumers to choose you over your competitor. Customer experience is driven by your communication strategy and customer experience is and will be the most important factor for consumers to choose a brand. This post talks about improving the customer experience using the cost effective cloud telephony solutions.

Problems Faced by New Micro Financial Institutions

• Don’t Invest in a call center at an early stage
• Outsourcing the customer contact center and relying on them to engage customers
• Missing omnichannel customer experience
• Not focusing on customer feedback
• Agents are not trained enough to face challenges coming up with undeserved customers

Customer Experience is the Most Important Factor

Customer experience is a critical factor in getting new customers, generating leads and holding back existing customers. The vast majority of leads in microfinance tends to interact with the business on call, to become more familiar with the solution. Still, communication strategy is in its infancy stage in the microfinance industry. However, banks are adopting new technologies to communicate with customers such as WhatsApp bots, IVR and chatbots. Microfinance industry still needs to think and bring in the advanced communication strategies available to interact with customers.

Focusing on CX is the “must-have” for all the industries and it can be done using cloud telephony solutions. Expansion of Small Microfinance Businesses Unlike the banking sector, the microfinance industry targets the unprivileged section of society and mostly operates in remote areas. Customers prefer to speak in local languages and mostly prefer to discuss the solution on call.

Challenges in expanding the business

Challenge#1: Need to setup call center in different geographic areas:

Customers being confined in remote areas, the most preferred way to gain customer trust in this business is physical meeting. The targeted segment is not well versed with technology, so they prefer to discuss over call.
Setting up a call center is not possible for small microfinance businesses because call center setup is expensive. IT requires infrastructure, equipment and proper IT team to handle which is possibly not affordable for every early-stage business.

Challenge#2:Hiring agents who are comfortable with local language:

As the targeted customers prefer to speak in local languages, the call center agents should also be comfortable with the local language to provide the best experience and increase conversions.
Here, the microfinance sales and CX team should be local and able to convince customers in their own language to get the maximum business. But, in a country like India where language changes in every state, it is not possible for businesses to set up a call center in the states.

Let’s discuss the solutions for the above challenges

Solution: Mobile Call Center – *astDial

Microfinance business wants to get local without much investment, serve customers in local language and local language is the key to get more customers on board. In such scenarios, “local factor” is shaping the customer experience for the organizations.

Therefore, it is important that microfinance organizations start implementing smart solutions to expand their business. Let’s understand how mobile call centers can help them expand in different regions and shape their customer experience.

Let’s understand the proposed solution

What is a Mobile Call Center?

*astDial – mobile call center solution ,converts your smartphone into a mobile call center. You just have to download the application, register your details there and start operating your call center with your smartphone.

Setup Remote Call Centers Using Mobile Phone

Mobile call center just requires a smartphone and internet connection to start call center operations. It eliminates the need for any infrastructure, expensive equipment and IT team to handle the setup.

How Mobile Call Center Can Help Microfinance Industry?

*astDIAL will allow microfinance startups to expand their wings in new geographical areas as they can now easily operate remotely without any investment.

Other Benefits of astDIAL

Cost Saving

Mobile contact centers for the microfinance industry can help companies to save a huge amount on infrastructure, agents onboarding and even companies save on salaries by hiring students, part-time agents and freelancers.

Advantage of the Local Skills

The microfinance industry is driven by “Local-Factor” and *astDIAL enables that factor for the companies as local people can easily convince the customers due to obvious reasons like the same language, and culture.

Easy Agents Onboarding

Local agents can be easily onboarded with this solution as agents don’t need travel or shift to other locations for work. Companies can easily hire them and they can work from their convenient place. Even, companies have the advantage of hiring part-time agents, freelancers and students.

Mobile call center solutions give companies the option to assign leads and campaigns to the agents and then monitor their performance. As soon as an agent is onboarded, managers can assign them leads, those leads will appear on their app. They can choose to autodial the leads or manually call leads and convert them. On the other hand, managers can see the live report of the agent like call duration, no.of calls, call disposition etc.

This solution makes it easy for companies to hire local agents from any part of the country. Companies can hire agents who are well versed with the local languages and even know that particular area.

*astDial Case study

One of the *astCRM microfinance clients could save 90% of the costing on their customer support team by implementing the astdial.

Challenges:

They came up with the following challenges to astCRM:
• They could not expand to other regions due to the infrastructure cost involved
• Lack of Remote Ready Infrastructure
• Remote Agent Monitoring

Solutions Provided by asTCRM

• Mobile Call Center Solution
• Integration of call center with the CRM

Results

• The operation expanded from 4 agents in a single city to 12 agents in 3 cities
• Improved Agent Productivity
• Live monitoring of the agents performance
• Easy onboarding of the agents

Benefits of astdial

1. Run Call Centers from Smartphone

*astdial allows you to set up the call center on your smartphone without the requirement of any infrastructure. Agents just need a mobile phone and a stable internet connection to start operating.

Costs such as buying an office space, buying equipment and hiring a maintenance team are all eliminated in this solution. In short, with the mobile call center solution infrastructure and maintenance costs are not there. It gives organizations to focus on quality hiring and operations.

2. Smooth Lead Assignment

It is easy for managers to assign leads to agents by uploading the data in bulk in the backend application provided to the mangers. Even there are options to assign a campaign to a team or an individual.

3. Reporting is Easy

Managers can easily monitor the agent’s activity using their backend application and metrics such as call duration, no.of calls, call disposition and live calls are available. If not live, they can download the data in bulk and analyze.

Mobile call centers can be easily integrated with the CRM in order to automate the process of lead assignment and lead status updates.

All High-Grade Call Center Features Available

Despite being the affordable solution the call quality is not compromised. All the features of the high-grade call centers are available at the supervisor interface such as snoop, barge and whisper.

Conclusion

It is evident that local support has always been beneficial for brands and that’s the reason brands have been focusing on creating local content to serve a larger audience. And,when it comes to the microfinance industry, the local factor becomes more prominent due to the nature of business.

We hope this post could help you understand the importance of mobile call center solutions for the microfinance industry. If you have any questions regarding implementation of the solution then you contact us at sales@astcrm.com