Innovation in mobile money distribution: real-time electronic reporting on agent performance
Posted: September 21st, 2011 | viewed: (1,636) | Comments: ( 2 ) | Topic: Agent Networks, Blog Post, MTN MobileMoney | Region: Africa
mobile money platforms that rely on networks of cash-in/cash-out agents to take in and pay out cash need that network to be healthy in order to offer customers a compelling value proposition. The lynchpin of channel health is liquidity, but compliance with customer-due-diligence standards, merchandising standards, and so on are also important. A key success factor in ensuring channel health is monitoring: routine personal visits by representatives of the mobile money service provider to agent locations are the only way to assess to what extent agents are adhering to their obligations and offering customers a quality retail experience.
But collecting these reports, consolidating the data, summarizing the results in a way that is insightful and actionable (including a system for flagging problems until they are resolved) is a challenge. That’s why I was impressed by a new tool that’s recently been rolled out to the trade development representatives (TDRs) employed by MTN to support the MobileMoney agent network in Uganda. Each TDR carries an inexpensive Android handset with an application installed that replaces a paper checklist (such as the ones that TDRs employed by Top Image in Kenya use when visiting M-PESA agents for Safaricom). The TDR can quickly complete the electronic form while at the agent shop. Not only do TDRs use the form to report on an agents’ performance; they can also highlight issues which need attention but which they cannot resolve on the spot, such as “agent re-training required.”
When they’ve finished filling out the form and the TDR hits submit, the report is uploaded electronically and a database, which contains every report on every agent outlet, is updated. In this case, that database is hosted by Salesforce.com, which makes it easy to manipulate the data and create reports that are useful to management; a list of agents who require re-training, for example, could be forwarded to the point person for scheduling attendance at training sessions.
This system not only provides management with better visibility into the workings of its agent network; it also provides better visibility into productivity of its field representatives. Reports from agent shops are geo-tagged, making it significantly more difficult for a TDR to, say, file reports on agents he hasn’t actually visited.
This system was created for MTN by AppLab, an initiative of the Grameen Foundation. Their team has calculated that the cost of deploying these handsets pays for itself in seven months. How? The time that TDRs would otherwise spend doing manual data entry and data collation if they were using a paper-based system can now be spent focused on what’s most important: monitoring, and improving, agent performance.
At a recent MMU Working Group, the CEO of Top Image in Kenya described the importance of agent monitoring. Examples of checklists that several agent-mediated financial services use around the world to track the performance of their agents can be found in the appendices of CGAP’s Agent Management Toolkit.
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This is what Kenya’s mobile money operators currently need. As stated time spent on reporting is reduced, and also late reports due to poor infrastructure in areas visited is greatly minimized. Not to mention the benefit of real-time data!
i think it makes complete sense to deploy a real time technology solution. We are contemplating & evaluating various options to such activity for a more hands on monitoring of our agent network. However, doling out mobile phones to the sales force which runs in few hundred now and especially Android carries a higher cost, on top of it getting these phones stolen or snatched is by itself another challenge to cope up with. I wonder what is the scale of this deployment done @ MTN network… Adnan Nayab – UBL OMNI.