OKO provides effective, affordable crop insurance to farmers in emerging markets by using new technologies in satellite imagery and weather forecasting to simplify and automate the claim management process, making crop insurance accessible to thousands of smallholder farms.
Challenge: Connecting with customers
Serving the agricultural community across Africa, OKO was using SMS to communicate and engage with farmers for purchasing crop insurance and sharing valuable information, such as weather updates, to minimize crop damage. However, SMS communication was often limited and ineffective due to the low literacy rate of farmers. In addition, mobile carrier SMS charges were proving costly for this low-income demographic.
Solution: Voice and video messages
OKO discovered that around 30% of the smallholder farmer population in Mali was already using WhatsApp to send voice recordings and videos, rather than just text-based messages. Hence, OKO turned to 8x8 to integrate WhatsApp and other Chat Apps into their crop insurance service offering.
Alongside the 8x8 Chat Apps API, 8x8 provided a comprehensive onboarding and training program, helping OKO integrate the API quickly as well as deploy WhatsApp chatbots to help automate specific customer engagement functions. This has simultaneously improved the quality of customer service and the efficiency of OKO’s sales process.
The ability to broadcast messages or video content, create discussion groups and engage with their customer community in this unique way helps to free up contact centre resources to focus on more qualified sales leads. Personalized quotes can now be provided for every enquiry received from farmers, driving down the cost of acquisition while improving the overall customer experience.