If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again: The power of continuous learning in innovation
This guest post is from 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 June 2022, Mastercard Strive partnered with Boost to research and develop a solution to a well-known challenge in the digital commerce sector: the data insights from B2B commerce services benefit distributors and suppliers more than micro-retailers.
With the support of Strive and CGAP, Boost set out to address two core learning objectives:
- How might we drive micro-retailers’ digital engagement?
- What combination of credit and insights provides the most impact on micro-retailers’ business?
Our ambition was to develop a new platform feature that would transform retailers’ order history into digestible insights, enabling them to better understand the health and patterns of their business and make more informed decisions. If successful, the project would lead to improved retailer business confidence, growth in retailer profitability, and higher levels of engagement with Boost’s platform.
Over the course of this project, Boost has been working with Unilever’s Shakti Retailer Network (learn more in our previous blog post) in Nigeria through the introduction of embedded stock financing (“Stock Boosts”). We’ve also increased retailers digital engagement through the use of our WhatsApp chatbot that enables retailers to self-order and receive insights and nudges (“Self-Ordering with Insights”).
Overall, 84% of retailers who participated in the project reported an increase in business revenue due to Self-Ordering with Insights or Stock Boosts. The greatest benefit was seen by retailers in the experimental cohort who received access to both Self-Ordering with Insights and Stock Boosts, with 97% of retailers in this cohort reporting that their revenue had “slightly increased” and “very much increased.”
Lessons learned from our Mastercard Strive project
Get the basics right. When we surveyed retailers to ask them what business insights they would find most valuable, we were surprised to learn that accurate pricing and stock availability were their top priorities. We learned that early adopters of digital ordering had been let down by other B2B digital ordering services that couldn’t keep the information on their platform up to date. While business-focused insights could be valuable in the future, we learned that efforts were best focused on ensuring the insights we shared with retailers were tied to the core value derived by retailers on the platform: the convenience of easy and accurate digital ordering.
Foster tech and touch. Digital self-ordering was a behavior change for both retailers and the sales agents who serve them. We learned the importance of focusing our change management efforts on the platform’s core users (the sales agents) and how we can best support them to drive the change with retailers. Our previous blog post provides more detail on how we evolved field teams to digital champions.
Retailers are cautious but optimistic about digital solutions. We found that the peri-urban and rural retailers served by the Shakti Retailer Network were enthusiastic about digital self-ordering and nudges once we overcame the initial challenges of convincing the sales agents. At the same time, retailers wanted to gain confidence in the fidelity of digital self-ordering before investing more time and deepening their digital relationships. As a result, the process of onboarding retailers took longer than expected, reducing our time to iterate on the content of the nudges.
Positive feedback from retailers encouraged more experimentation by our teams. We found that the enthusiasm of our on-the-ground team to test and iterate our solution was strongly correlated to the feedback we received from retailers. If experiments produced limited results or negative feedback, our teams lost confidence in our plans, while positive feedback from retailers motivated the team to test and iterate. A lesson we will carry forward is how to ensure each experiment results in actionable feedback from our users.
Macro events can put wrinkles in field testing. In our case, 25% of the project timeline and 50% of trial time was lost to delays related to state and national elections and a sudden demonetization drive in Nigeria. We had to extend the length of the project to ensure we had sufficient time to test with users.
Launching nudges in other markets
From the get-go, we aimed to build technology and processes that could be replicated across other countries and contexts to serve a large range of distributor customers and retailer users.
In the last quarter of 2023, we expanded access to the nudge feature within the Boost platform. The feature is now available for use across all six markets Boost operates in, including Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa. It has been sent in English, French, and Arabic.
Our teams have embraced the power of short learning loops, combining access to the nudge feature and our insights on driving digital uptake by micro-retailers to test a wide range of use cases. Sharing learnings and insights across countries and our teams fosters further experimentation and propagation of best practices.
- In Egypt, wholesalers are using nudges to activate their retailer customers at risk of churn.
- In Ghana, we are supporting a distributor in using nudges to drive self-ordering and reduce the cost-to-serve of their retailer base.
- In Kenya, we are supporting a distributor to A/B test order cut-off messages and promotions with their retailer base.
Early results show that retailers who receive nudges and self-order grow their order values by more than 15% and expand the range of products they purchase.
Looking ahead
Today, our nudge feature is available to all users of the Boost platform in any market they operate in. We have built a playbook on how to drive retailer digital self-ordering and engagement that has been tested across varying digital landscapes and countries.
In addition, our work trialing embedded working capital solutions for retailers has taught us the benefit of working with local lenders in the markets we serve. In the near future, we hope to offer Boost distributor, wholesaler, and retailer users access to working capital through local banking partners who use the data from the Boost platform to make informed credit decisions.
