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Presentation of Vodacom Mozambique
Vodacom Mozambique is the leading mobile network operator in Mozambique, with almost 7 million GSM subscribers. Their mobile money product, called M-Pesa, is a key strategic focus for them to diversify their revenue streams and ensure customer retention. Similarly to the ubiquitous service in Kenya, M-Pesa is a mobile money wallet linked to a Vodacom phone number that enables you to store and send money, purchase airtime and bills, etc.
The Challenge
One of the challenges associated with building mobile money penetration is the sensistisation of new customers. While mobile money is quite well known in East Africa, and the benefits understood, it is a relatively new concept in Mozambique. Vodacom was therefore supported by the IFC to engage a campaign of customer education leveraging street promoters, managed by a third party agency called Rural Digital Media.
500 promoters have been deployed across the country to go to public spaces, markets, busy streets, etc. engage with the customers about the service, show a demo, explain how it works and in the end get them to perform an action on the service, like activating the account, purchasing airtime, sending money, etc. The sensitised customer would eventually walk away with a leaflet to remember alone how to go about the service.
This marketing approach is called Below the line (BTL), and has proven quite effective in getting people to adopt services that can be perceived as complicated or sensitive due to the use of money, such as M-Pesa. It is a proven technique that has been adopted at large scale by other consumer good companies.
The frequent issues that arise with this marketing spend is to ensure the marketing agency is actually deploying all the promoters that have been paid, during the right timing and most importantly to measure the effectiveness of the activities. Before, Rural Digital Media used to rely on pen and paper to get the team leaders of each team to record the customer engaged and the activities done. Then these data were consolidated into a reporting file, that was shared to the mobile operator to check in the Business Intelligence reports whether that was true or not.
The Solution: deploying FieldPro App to the promoters
In order to differentiate from other BTL marketing agencies, Rural Digital Media was looking for an efficient way to collect data from the promoters, manage their performance and share the results with the operator.
Optimetriks has helped them to do so with the deployment of our mobile app of specific workflows to capture:
- The start and ending of the BTL activity with GPS coordinates and picture. To be filled by the Team Leader in charge of conducting the activity
- The contact details of the customer and agent engaged. To be filled by the promoter after each customer interaction
The data captured for each customer is comprehensive with the phone number, the gender, the type of interaction, etc. Vodacom can in turn use this data directly from the reports to check in their Business Intelligence system if the interaction really took place, and if yes pay the marketing agency accordingly.
Specific features were done such as:
- The display of the questionnaires in Portuguese, which is Mozambique main language.
- The implementation of validation rule to ensure of the data quality captured. For example, for phone numbers, the field can only be filled with numbers starting with 258 and that are 12 digits long.
The reporting is viewable in real time on our web dashboards in the Power BI interface. Multiple filters per date or team enable to go through the dataset to ensure an effective management of the promoters force.
The impact
The main benefit of the Optimetriks solution is that it skips the tedious process of aggregating the data, ensuring its consistency and producing the report. All this is done seamlessly, from the submission on the field to the display on the web dashboards. According to Rural Digital Media, it has saved them the cost of allocating 2 full time data analysts on this task. The reports are accessible in real time on a dedicated Power Bi interface, from which downloads can be made into pdf or Excel spreadsheets.
Our partner with the marketing agency Rural Digital Media has been very effective, as stated in the words of its manager:
“Optimetriks has been a tremendous partner to help me expand my BTL business, I have deployed across 3 countries on thousands of promoters. The mobile app is extremely easy to use, the reporting very clear, and their support super reactive. I would definitely recommend adoption their solution”
Brain Rwehabura, Manager Rural Digital Media
10 months after starting the deployment of our solution, more then 500,000 submissions were captured thanks to our mobile application. The results in Mozambique being very satisfactory, the solution was also adopted for customer education projects in Lesotho, Tanzania and Uganda.
If you are also conducting street marketing activities, and would like to get more accurate data from the field, please get in touch with us!
