Approach
We started by establishing some key questions that would help us quickly identify the critical, unmet needs of both agents and customers. We learned that the most frequent issue with mobile money was that customers were too often running into technical issues like being locked out of their accounts—and too often agents didn’t have the right training, or enough time to solve the problem.
What if we could both train and incentivize them to provide a meaningful technical support touchpoint to customers? Based on data, we had a good idea when customer traffic typically slowed down and agents were unoccupied, so I worked an SMS-based service that would point customers to nearby agents had low customer traffic.
Challenges
There are significant considerations that make designing for the developing world very different compared to, say, San Francisco. Smartphone penetration is low, so feature phones and SMS's are the lowest common denominator. However, messages need to get straight to the point as only the first 140 characters of any message get sent. The rest of that long message sadly goes into the abyss, and dividing the text up unto multiple messages costs the customer twice the storage, and the MNO twice the cost.
Simulating with games
I worked with our communications designer to design several games that could help us understand the right incentives for agents, and frequency of communications for both actors.
These helped us shape the constraints and necessary moments of support that were built into our final prototype
