Looking beyond software to increase product adoption
When we think about product adoption a lot of different technological approaches come to our minds. Product management is not just about software and what is shown on the screen but also about getting the whole ecosystem right.
Introducing a product, especially a tech product like Fasal, to the farmers in India requires unlearning a lot of things. How we read and perceive things might be different from how a farmer would. A major challenge to increase product adoption is the steep learning curve. So, when we ask them to start using new technology, it is important that they understand the technology well and should be able to use it right out of the box. We observed that the majority of the farmers are familiar with a lot of regular apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. and some of them even use Instagram. So, all the features in Fasal are designed in a way that the farmers are able to relate it with their prior experiences with other applications.
We also observed that there is a certain level of expectation of regular customer interaction. If they have a query regarding any product feature or farming in general they would prefer someone to explain it to them over a call, face-to-face meeting, or through videos.
With these understandings, we looked beyond just the software to utilize various other ways and channels that could improve the adoption of our product. Let’s look at some of the key points that we focused towards.
Localizing the product
Localization doesn’t just mean translation from one language to another. When we talk about localization it becomes crucial to understand that it also focuses on how language is spoken in a particular context and culture. India is a land where language and its dialect change when you move from one city to another and it becomes an even bigger and more important factor when you’re trying to introduce a new technology that will be used by the Indian farmers.
To realize our vision of revolutionizing the Indian agriculture ecosystem, it became crucial for us to focus on localizing our whole application into regional languages that are spoken across India.
As we expanded, we started introducing new languages based on the geographies where we were working. We started with English and Hindi and slowly introduced Marathi but now our application is available in 6 different Indian languages including English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu.
Empowering business teams
Business teams are the ones that are present on the field are the first point of contact for any of our users. Hence, part of our responsibility is also to provide sufficient information about the product to everyone at the forefront who interacts with the users regularly. We started informing the business teams about the various features that get launched in the product. Whenever a new feature is launched we conduct a detailed session with all the relevant stakeholders and provide training to them about the new changes.
Mandatory training to the farmers
After talking to a lot of users, we realized how important a factor training is and it was also demanded by a lot of users. As a part of our onboarding process, we started conducting a mandatory training session for the new customers to help them become familiar with the Fasal system as well as the various agricultural concepts used within the app like disease risk calculation, irrigation management, etc. This training session is very inclusive and opens up a two-way communication channel where a lot of queries that our users have also get answered.
Organizing Webinars and publishing Youtube videos
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.
- Troy Olson and Jeff Loquist
Apart from circulating the monthly product updates, we started recording a lot of informative videos for the farmers to help them understand the scientific concepts behind agriculture and how we use sensor data to give out advisories applying these concepts.
We didn’t stop there, we started conducting a lot of webinars on a wide range of topics related to our devices, crop physiology, disease prediction, etc. for our users which would help them get maximum benefit using our product. We also organized webinars and invited experts to come and talk about recommended agricultural practices for different crops, in order to help all the farmers improve their existing practices.
We at Fasal strongly believe that empowering our farmers is the key to revolutionizing agriculture. When farmers adopt the latest technological solutions to make farming more efficient, it will bring a paradigm shift in our agriculture ecosystem.
