In my last blog ‘Mobile Literacy: A Significant Barrier to Rural Value Added Service Usage’ we talked about one of the challenges that is holding back users experiencing the service in the first place (before a CRM even becomes relevant) and suggested some options to mitigate this challenge. In this blog we are going to share some of our recent experiences as an outcome of those steps taken by our programmes.

In my previous blog we have talked about a freemium model where a 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. Our grantee in Tanzania, Tigo Kilimo providing mobile agriculture information have been using the freemium model for customer acquisition and education and the result was overwhelming. We have seen a big jump in number of new users, hopefully many of those will be converted to regular users. A Freemium offer has been made for SMS services where users can dial an USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) menu and can request information to be delivered through SMS. So we thought it would be a good idea to meet some of the users and get first hand feedback. This time we met around 20 users in rural areas in Tanzania. There was a good mix of regular and ‘heavy’ users. Before I share some of our experiences while we met those users, let me give an overview of Tigo Kilimo service in Tanzania – the service has been offered through SMS (Short Messaging Service) at the first place and an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) has recently been introduced where a farmer can get the same information (weather update, market price and agronomy advice) in voice. In case the farmer doesn’t find the information they were searching for on IVR, they could also connect to the real time agricultural helpline. Although IVR has been launched very recently, we have seen that farmers are keen to use it and want to talk to the agronomy expert when they can’t get answers of their unresolved information need.

We were lucky to talk to couple of users and have seen some interesting customer insights.

Farmers would choose the most suitable service channel:

The first farmer I talked to was exposed to the service through extension agents in his area. This mid-aged farmer uses USSD to retrieve agricultural information (delivered through SMS) through his feature phone. We offered him to experience the newly launched IVR service where he can get the same information through voice with additional feature to talk to an extension agent. It was interesting to see that although he could navigate the IVR properly, he still liked SMS more than the IVR service, because he could store SMS tips in his handset for easy reference and could use and share it with other farmers afterwards.

Early adopters are young and entrepreneurial farmers:

It was fascinating to see young women and men who, regardless of the size of their farm, feel optimistic about the future and are trying all available opportunities in order to be able to improve their production and earn a stable income. Farmers between the age of 18 and 30 are most comfortable with the mobile technology, they quickly adapt USSD navigation, check all available options on the menu, and are not afraid to try new farming practices and crops. They are also eager to share the information with their community – either to educate the parents on the service, demonstrate the tips received to their friends or ask their more advanced fellow farmers to demonstrate a new farming technique they have just learned from Tigo Kilimo.

Farmers really want agricultural information services to continue for various reasons:

Finally we met one of the heavy users of the newly launched IVR service – a young fellow from rural Tanzania. He got to know about the service through a mobile operator’s promotion and tried it afterwards. He followed all the step-by-step instructions that he received from the service to grow his tomatoes and mentioned that he has increased his harvest compared to the previous year. He urged us to continue providing this service and also mentioned that he would continue using this service even if the price increased because if he wanted to find similar information from an extension worker in his locality, he would have to spend a lot more than what he was paying for the mobile service. Moreover, he can share this information with his friends while browsing the IVR or talking to the helpline agent on his mobile loudspeaker.

This trip and discussion we had with the service users was hugely inspirational for our team. And although mobile literacy is a significant barrier to mobile VAS adoption, there is a lot of hope that, the situation is going to improve pretty quickly as farmers in matured mobile markets tend to try new things and learn how to use the mobile phone as a tool to access the information about better farming techniques, weather forecast or market dynamics.

This is my final blog in this series because mAgri Programme is gearing up to achieve its next goal under mNutrition Initiative and we shall be coming back to you with more inspiring stories from South Asia and Africa. Stay tuned and find out about our expanding mAgri Programme here.