How a leading Indian NBFC doubled sales productivity with Voice-based Mobility

How a leading Indian NBFC doubled sales productivity with Voice-based Mobility

3 min read

Last week, Uniphore’s CEO, Umesh Sachdev, was invited to speak at the Banking, Finance and Technology Forum (BFTF) in Mumbai. The event brings together an exclusive group of senior-level executives from the BFSI sector in India to network, learn and share best practices and strategies in applying technology to meet business goals.

BFTF occurred only days after an important Zinnov report was released, which asserted that IT spending in the BFSI vertical in India is expected to reach USD 3.5 billion by FY 2014, growing at a CAGR of 13%. At the conference, industry leaders emphasized that this growth is particularly attributed to the adoption of mobility strategies. They discussed several factors driving this adoption, including regulatory compliance needs, support for growth strategies, and enhanced customer experience for competitive differentiation. However, most participants in the conference agreed that the major motivation behind the adoption of enterprise mobility strategies in BFSI is cost reduction. This is particularly true in sectors such as insurance – a loss making industry under intense budgetary pressures.

Geared toward this goal of cost reduction, mobile applications offer significant value to BFSI companies both from a B2E (internal users) and a B2C (external users) perspective. The primary use cases that were discussed at BFTF were transaction management and sales force automation. In addition to these, some of the business processes that are amenable to mobile-enablement include New Business Generation, Policy Management, Claims Management, Sales & Marketing.

However, many speakers in the conference agued that technology adoption in the BFSI sector continues to face some challenges that need to be overcome to sustain the growth rate that Zinnov has predicted. The main roadblocks are a lack of success stories for emerging technologies like cloud computing and increasing security threats with consumerization of IT.

In his speech, Umesh sought to address some of these challenges by sharing the successes and lessons learned from Uniphore’s mobile solution deployments in the sector. He provided a detailed account of how a leading NBFCs deployed a cloud-based fieldforce automation solution, which increased worker productivity by 100% and nearly eliminated fraud.

The solution is designed as an end-to-end mobility solution using voice, GPRS, and SMS for the sales and collections processes of the company. For each step in the work-flow – lead capture, follow-up, document collection, feasibility reporting, etc. – the field agent merely enters the information in the relevant form on his basic feature phone. Each form can be filled either through text inputs or voice inputs, allowing agents to select their most convenient form of interacting with a mobile. If the agent chooses the voice input option, the system engages him in an interactive dialogue in his native language to complete the desired transaction. The agent can also easily transmit statutory customer documentation by merely taking a picture with his phone. The back-end module immediately collates these text and voice in one powerful web application, giving business managers unprecedented visibility to field operations. Using this application, managers approve service requests in matter of minutes and communicate these decisions to the field agents, so they not only have visibility into real time operations, but can confidently analyze their business knowing that the underlying data is error-free and up-to-date.

As BFSI enterprises continue to explore enterprise mobility solutions as a lever to further improve operational excellence and efficiencies, reduce cost and innovate, Uniphore looks forward to being a proud partner in this dialogue.  The best strategies will be those that balance security requirements, device management, application development, and smooth integration processes. When executed correctly, comprehensive mobility strategies will inevitable revolutionize the services and operations of the industry.

About Uniphore: Uniphore Technologies Inc is the leader in Multi lingual speech-based software solutions. Uniphore’s solutions allow any machine to understand and respond to natural human speech, thus enabling humans to use the most natural of communication modes, speech, to engage and instruct machines. Uniphore operates from its corporate headquarters at IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai, India and has sales offices in Middle East (Dubai, UAE) as well as in Manila, Philippines.

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