Renuka Behera grew up immersed in the business of dairy farming as the daughter of a milk business owner. Like many other families living in rural communities in Odisha, India, Renuka and her family have relied on agriculture to earn an income and feed their families. But their crops often do not generate enough income to support farming families — especially as smallholder farmers battle unstable crop prices and escalating challenges from climate change.

Renuka and her husband own a small plot of land, but they can only grow enough rice for their family and hay for their cows. Six years ago, she and her husband decided they needed to add another source of income to put their daughter and son through school. Renuka chose to return to her roots and launched a dairy business of her own.

Cultivating customer engagement through digital tools

While Renuka learned from her father how to run a dairy business, she still needed capital to make her vision a reality. At her neighbor’s suggestion, Renuka applied for a loan from Annapurna Finance Pvt. Ltd., a microfinance institution and longtime partner of Accion. She joined a Joint Liability Group with four other women entrepreneurs in her village – a shop owner, a restaurant owner, a grocer, and another dairy farmer – giving her access to affordable, low-interest capital for her business.

Annapurna’s commitment to ensuring clients like Renuka can more easily access and are better served by its financial solutions prompted the institution to enhance its customer engagement platform. With funding from the Swiss Capacity Building Facility and strategic and operational support from Accion Advisory, Annapurna introduced digital customer engagement channels to improve customer outreach and service.

Accion worked closely with Annapurna’s product innovation team to research customer needs and concerns and design each channel with the findings in mind. The team considered several factors, including:

• Accessibility: Different channels were developed and implemented so customers could choose the option that suits them best based on their level of comfort and digital maturity. For smartphone users, the platform uses a widely available and familiar application like WhatsApp to simplify the learning curve. For customers without access to a smartphone or who prefer to interact via voice or SMS messaging, these options are available as well. Annapurna recently launched a voice-based chatbot that converses in the local languages and has a functional text bot that communicates over WhatsApp.
• Language: Each channel accommodates multiple languages and emphasizes the use of simple, easy-to-understand vernacular. Messages sent to customers use colloquial language to ensure they can clearly understand the communication.
• Trust: Despite their growing prevalence, many customers remained apprehensive about the idea of using digital tools. To alleviate concerns, Annapurna focused on key trust markers to reassure customers, leveraging loan officers to provide a personal touch and remind them that Annapurna is a credible Central Bank-approved institution, which contact numbers they should save and respond to, not to disclose their one-time password (OTP), and never to send money to unverified sources.

How women farmers can reap the benefits of digitization

Renuka used her first loan of 30,000 INR (around $360 USD) to purchase three dairy cows to start her business. As she’s increased her milk production and sales, she’s been able to increase her loan size from Annapurna. Her current loan of 70,000 INR (around $845 USD) gave her the capital to add two more cows and construct a shade to shield her cows from the intense Indian heat. Through Annapurna’s digital customer engagement channels, she can easily receive updates about her loan and communicate with Annapurna for loan-related information without having to wait for her loan officer to visit or go to the branch.

For women farmers like Renuka, who often hold dual responsibilities of managing their household and the farm, digital tools offer convenience and save valuable time that they can instead use to focus on growing their businesses and providing for their families. Annapurna plans to continue expanding and optimizing its digital customer engagement platform so more customers can benefit from it.

Prioritizing customer needs yields results

Annapurna equally benefits from investing in digital channels and more importantly, from applying learnings from its research and customer feedback to every enhancement and rollout. As of June 2024, Annapurna has reached more than 1 million customers through its digital channels, with nearly 180,000 customers actively interacting with the institution.

Besides expanding its reach, Annapurna has increased customer confidence by emphasizing trust markers and transparency through targeted communications, including a recent fraud awareness and prevention campaign that ran using interactive voice response (IVR) technology. The ability to communicate important information and fulfill service requests digitally has also freed up loan officers’ time to focus on prospecting and relationship management, increasing operational efficiency.

As Annapurna continues to implement platform improvements, it will remain attentive to customers’ varying levels of digital maturity, which poses a key challenge to adoption if not addressed. Rural customers like Renuka typically need more support and training to embrace and regularly use digital channels and often prefer voice-based interactions over text. Digital maturity levels, channel preferences, and the use of simple vernacular are critical success factors that will continue to inform Annapurna’s ongoing digital transformation and approach to customer engagement.

Learn more about Accion’s work to help financial service providers strengthen customer relationships in a digital environment.