How to Improve Microfinance Marketing and Confirm More than 200 Loan Applications in a Few Hours

Case

Before the COVID-19 disaster, our employer got around 100 new contacts every week: clients have to leave their cell phone numbers to make a request for a loan. Microfinance organization’s workers could easily call all of them.

After a complete lockdown happened, many companies were closed and a lot of people became destitute. The amount of applications raised many times – contacts’ database became bigger for 800-1000 numbers every week.

Problem

It happened often that clients sent requests to many organizations at once and forgot about them. It is important to offer a better

solution

for a client, but timely reminders about it is even more significant.
Unfortunately, the organization’s managers were not able to call such a huge amount of numbers in a short time.

Transferring the task to a call center was a bit challenging:
• 1) Most of them were closed because of the lockdown.
• 2) Call centers, which were still working, offered high prices – the price for an hour of work started from 12$.
• 3) Report on calls' statistics costs an extra price<.

The price for 1 loan was too high even if our client would agree to the best offer from a call center.

Solution

1 Our client prepared the test database. There were 4 000 phone numbers in total.

2 An audio clip was recorded by a female narrator. A female voice is usually associated with sympathy and compassion. A person who got into a difficult financial situation would take such a call more loyal.

The message was short and contained useful information only: what interest of a loan, what terms, and is there a possibility to get money online. Thanks to it more than 20% of contacts agreed to get a consultation from a manager.

The IVR system allowed to transfer a call to a manager immediately – it helped not to lose interested clients and to make another database with the number of those to whom managers can call later.

What was automatized?

Implementation

The robot called all phone numbers from the test database which was loaded in the client’s personal account. When the contact picked up the phone the robot was starting to play the recorded audio clip. In the message was said that a contact left a request for a loan and this loan can be got with low interest if it will be confirmed now.

If the client listened to the full message and hasn't hung up and, Effebot asked if the offer is still relevant.

Result