Empowering businesses through automated calls
RAVI Agarwal got the idea to establish his startup, engageSPARK, when he was volunteering with the Grameen Foundation in Ghana for a program helping pregnant women in poor rural areas. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a key part of this program was the sending out of a weekly message to the women.
“This is week 23 of your pregnancy. This is what’s happening inside your body. This is what you should eat. That story you may have heard about not eating meat during pregnancy is a myth,” Agarwal said as a way of example.
According to Agarwal, most people in emerging markets don’t have regular access to the internet, but they do have a mobile phone. This makes automated phone calls, which play pre-recorded audio when the person answers the phone, the most effective way to disseminate information, change behavior and gather data.
“These phone calls are very effective (especially compared to text messages) because they use sound, tone, gender, and age to persuade the listener in a one-on-one way that’s not possible with any other medium,” Agarwal said, adding that the listener is more likely to interact by pressing keys or giving answers because you have their attention. This situation holds true in the Philippines. Agarwal pointed to a United Nations study that said only 39.7 percent of Filipinos use the internet. Given that the majority of Filipinos aren’t online, but do own at least a feature phone, Agarwal called the opportunity to easily and affordably interact with people using automated phone calls immense.
Enter engageSPARK
Through the engageSPARK platform, a nonprofit or business can set up a campaign using the three-step wizard. Agarwal said that this can easily be done by someone who is non- technical and engageSPARK handles the interfacing with the telecommunications companies to obtain local inbound voice and toll-free SMS phone numbers.
“These campaigns can use SMS (or text messages) or automated phone calls to interact with people for many kinds of campaigns: alerts, reminders, curriculums, surveys, educational courses, hotlines and automatic information services,” Agarwal said.
While the engageSpark offers many possibilities, Agarwal said the biggest challenge had been marketing and selling it to Philippine non-profits and businesses. Most of them have never used automated phone calls to interact with their staff, customers or beneficiaries.
“Part of the sales process is to educate them on how it works, the potential, and how effective it is,” Agarwal said, adding that this approach has required them to meet prospective customers in person, which is more time intensive and harder to scale.
According to Agarwal, another major challenge of the sales process is that organizations believe Filipinos prefer to interact with SMS rather than phone calls. While they agree that SMS is more popular, Agarwal argues that—as a passive medium—SMS is better suited for mass notifications. It is not effective at changing behavior or getting people to respond and interact with a campaign.
A related objection is whether Filipinos will actually answer and interact with automated phone calls by pressing keys or voicing answers. To overcome this objection, Agarwal’s team shares case studies showing 60 percent to 70 percent of recipients answering phone calls and interacting with the content and explains why.
“Unlike SMS, Filipinos are not yet desensitized to automated phone calls—they actually answer most calls if they can and then interact. Most people in the Philippines haven’t received automated phone calls before and find them novel and captivating,” Agarwal said.
For example, Agarwal detailed the campaign of Mercy Corps, which engaged 20,000 survivors of Typhoon Yolanda with a financial education course to help them learn how to budget and save money. This was accomplished through soap opera-style dramatizations that played out financial issues and conflicts and culminated in quizzes, across both SMS and automated phone calls.
The numbers were promising. The response rate for SMS was at 4.5 percent, while the response rate for automated phone calls was at 48.2 percent.
There was also a 106-percent increase in the use of savings products from the participants who responded via automated phone calls.
Other nonprofits and companies are catching on to the potential of automated phone calls.
engageSPARK has now been used in over 80 countries by such clients as Asian Development Bank, Intel Corp. and International Rescue Committee.
The uses of the platform are varied and limited only by a company’s creativity.
Agarwal said some BPOs use automated phone calls to accelerate the screening and interviewing process. When someone applies for a job, he immediately receives a phone call wherein he can answer questions by pressing keys or speaking into the phone.
“The BPO recruiting team then listens to the recorded audio for two minutes to judge the level of spoken English skills, instead of spending 30 minutes for an in-person interview,” Agarwal said.
Agarwal’s short-term goal is to explore integrations with Facebook Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp, and even load top-ups, which are features that customers have been requesting.
“Our long-term goal is to build more products that are dual-use: the products help people in poverty (directly or indirectly) and are also sold to businesses or well-off consumers to help subsidize discounts for NGOuse,” he said.
Agarwal pointed out that this technology is nothing new—automated phone calls have been around for decades.
The problem is that they have been largely inaccessible to smaller organizations with fewer resources, who would have had to hire experts in information technology to deploy a campaign using automated phone calls.
“I realized that if we could successfully democratize this technology and make it accessible to non-technical staff at even the smallest NGO or business in any country, we could impact the lives of tens of millions of people around the world,” Agarwal shared.