In my last blog ‘Customer Retention Management: What should be the approach to keep users coming back to services?’ we discussed the concept of Customer Retention Management (CRM) and its importance to keeping customers using services.

In this blog, I want to talk about one of the challenges that is holding back users experiencing the service in the first place (before a CRM even becomes relevant). In our current mFarmer projects we have seen a good mix of mobile channels being used, like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Short Message Service (SMS), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and call centre. There is always a concern of usage trends and related behaviour of these mobile channels among the target audiences. We can easily predict that most farmers from rural Africa and South Asia are not users or at least not regular users of these mobile channels, so involving these mobile channels to deliver agricultural information is challenging. So what is holding back rural farmers using these channels and enjoying the benefits of accessing agricultural information through mobile?

In our recent face-to-face user tests in different parts of Africa and South Asia, we have seen rural farmers lack confidence and experience to try to learn how these mobile services work and provide value. Lack of confidence is mostly derived from lack of experience. Another important component which leads to lack of experience is fear about the high price or cost of usage. Traditionally Mobile Value Added Services are priced at a premium level which creates fears of unexpected cost to the users and ultimately prohibits them even trying the service. However, we need to find a way out and support farmers to use these services.

How can we solve these challenges?

Face to face user training and trial: in many cases while promoting Mobile Value Added Services, face-to-face user training (in the form of marketing) proved to be the most effective medium to increase the mobile Value Added Service literacy among rural mobile users.  While designing a face-to-face user training campaign, it would be wise to include trials, so new users can experience the new service through demonstrations. Training the trainers is another way to increase the effectiveness of the campaign. While saying trainers, I mean users who have the potential to promote the service to their friends and family members and have the curiosity about the service and have somewhat mobile literacy to act as an opinion leader.

Freemium: in the mobile industry, the word ‘Freemium’ is well known as a pricing (or marketing) strategy by which a mobile service (typically mobile value added services) is provided free of charge for a defined period (i.e. a week or a month) but money (premium) is charged once the free period is over. The word “freemium” has been derived by combining the two aspects of the business model: “free” and “premium”. This model is widely used in the Value Added Industry and provides the right environment for the users to understand the service and its value before they start paying for it. However, one important thing to remember while designing a freemium campaign is that freemium users shouldn’t be charged without their proper consent – details of the freemium offer should be explained properly. Often when freemium content and services are offered, curious users will opt into the service without thinking much about the post freemium charges. So it is not suggested to use freemium for subscriber acquisition,  rather, the freemium should expire  and users should opt into the service through a proper subscription method so that they don’t incur costs that they haven’t understood and agreed to.

We are going to advocate these steps to our grantees and we will come back to you with some outcomes in the near future.