Fostering tech and touch: Evolving field teams to digital champions

The following is a guest post written by Koye Oyeyinka of Boost Technology, a B2B commerce platform offering digital ordering and credit services to power growth for Africa’s 100 million micro- and small retailers.

In the last year, with grant funding from Strive Community and CGAP, Boost has been working with Unilever and the Growing Businesses Foundation (GBF) to grow the capacity of Nigeria’s Shakti Retailer Network through the introduction of embedded stock financing (we call these “Stock Boosts”) and increase their digital engagement through the use of our WhatsApp chatbot that enables retailers to self-order and receive insights and nudges.

The Shakti Retailer Network is a program of GBF and Unilever that supports over 10,000 semi-urban and rural female micro-retailers in Nigeria with access to stock and the crucial support services they require to grow their business. Launched in 2014, the program plays a critical role in Unilever’s route to market. (Learn more in our previous blog post.) Boost joined the program in December 2021, and our first year of engagement focused on supporting the digitization of existing order collection and payment recording processes used by GBF sales staff.

With the support of Strive Community, we have spent the last twelve months working to answer two questions:

1. How can we drive retailers’ digital engagement? and
2. What combination of credit and business insights provides the most impact on retailers’ businesses?

This blog post discusses what we learned in trying to answer the first question.

Digitization is a means to an end, not the end itself.

At Boost, we believe that digital tools can greatly improve the outcomes for small businesses working across the retail value chain. For retailers, the core benefits of digital ordering include the ability to check prices remotely, the convenience of ordering from and receiving products directly to their shop premises, and the opportunity to access payment terms and embedded working capital as a result of their transaction data.

Despite these benefits, digital ordering by retailers has had a slow uptake across many B2B digital platforms. Our social media feeds are filled with news of B2B commerce companies laying off hundreds of field sales and telesales representatives who were responsible for collecting orders. The struggle to get retailers to adopt digital ordering is real.

The challenges to drive digital ordering are many: the hurdle of installing an application, data consumption to update applications by users with small data bundles, frequent reformatting of phones, and, the most obvious, low but growing smartphone ownership across Nigeria. Digital ordering has to coexist with other ways of reaching and managing customers.

Using WhatsApp as our customer-facing application enables us to overcome many of these challenges, as it is often the most used mobile application for smartphone users and the first to be reinstalled if a phone has to be reformatted. The conversational nature of the application supports our ambition to help small businesses grow by enabling a deeper relationship with retailers: from only ordering to a state where we can empower retailers with real-time insights from their own and other similar businesses. A business assistant in their pocket!

Who is resistant to (which) changes?

From the onset of this project, we assumed there would be resistance from micro-retailers to changing their ordering habits — shifting from in-person order-taking by field representatives to placing their own orders via our WhatsApp-enabled platform (what we refer to as self-ordering).

Early surveys signaled two likely barriers to adopting self-ordering: the comfort of retailers with the field team and retailers’ concerns about the accuracy of stock prices and stock availability on the digital catalog. When we dug further into the latter barrier, we learned that many retailers had previous experiences trying to order via other digitally enabled distributors, but they often reverted to either calling or placing orders directly with sales staff because the prices of products were often not up to date and stock availability data was inaccurate. To accommodate these concerns, we migrated from one universal, country-wide product catalog for the Shakti network to channel-specific catalogs that enabled us to show retailers the pricing and product availability in their geography. Once retailers were assured of accurate data and experienced no changes in initial orders, this quickly became a non-issue.

Yet our early trials to drive self-ordering with the retailers were slow to show uptake, despite the training from our staff being well received and good rapport being built with the retailers. Additionally, over 80% of surveyed retailers found self-ordering to be easy or very easy, and 60% of field representatives surveyed found teaching their retailers to self-order to be easy or very easy. Upon further reflection, we found that we hadn’t done a sufficiently thorough job of enlightening all stakeholders about the benefits of self-ordering. Although the reverse is true, the field representatives who had the habit of regularly visiting retailers initially assumed it would increase their transportation costs. Also, without instruction from their senior management, who were not fully initiated into the scheme, field representatives were hesitant to change their established work routines. Changing their mindset — so they became advocates of self-ordering with the retailers they manage — became the main focus of our intervention.

Behavior change with core users: Field representatives

While we had always assumed that only a portion of all the retailers would self-order, we had forgotten the importance of providing a compelling narrative to our core stakeholders: field representatives.

Our next phase of testing self-ordering focused on convincing field representatives of the benefits of “tech and touch.” Instead of viewing self-ordering as an activity that would threaten their livelihoods, we showed how a mix of tech and touch would enable field representatives to grow their retailer base without adding more workload.

Unilever’s 5 Levers of Change framework illustrates our behavior change campaign with field representatives.

Understanding the delicate relationship between field representatives and their retailers has informed our tech-and-touch model. Our approach has been to reward observed positive behavior change.

Driving the habit of tech and touch

At the core of our digitization drive was the need to reimagine and communicate the changing role of the field representative from one that serves fixed sales routes to one that manages a larger community of retailers through a mix of in-person visits, phone calls, and tech support.

To kick-start the habit, we targeted 116 retailers and experimented with incentives for both retailers and field representatives. The financial incentives were applied for three months, from June to August. During this period, the number of retailers who self-ordered constantly grew until 81 retailers self-ordered 161 times in the final month, and we could see strong signs that the change was becoming a habit:

• Retention of the habit remains high, with 80% of the 70 retailers that ordered in the first month continuing to self-order in the third month.
• For 65% of self-ordering retailers, orders placed via self-order were greater than orders placed via their field representatives.
• 75% of retailers in the trial completed a blend of self-orders and assisted orders by their field representative.
• 25% of retailers in the trial used self-ordering exclusively, with over 43% completing two or more self-orders in a month.
• 43% of retailers who placed four or more orders in a month used self-ordering more than 50% of the time.

Driving further digital adoption

After a few false starts, our latest effort focused on communicating the change and benefits to the field representatives is proving to work. Building on this momentum, we aim to trial self-ordering in other regions this year before expanding access to the entire existing Shakti network by the end of 2024.

Our experience has also shown us how hard it is to introduce a completely new behavior to a long-established network. With new partners and new geographic areas, our focus will be on how to introduce a tech-and-touch approach from the beginning.

This next phase of experimentation focuses on delivering insights and nudges to retailers with the aim of improving their outcomes and resilience. Stay tuned as we share insights from that in a future post.