The demand for micro-credit in rural India is rising. But, are MFIs doing enough to utilize this great scope and improve their credit culture from the current 10%?

As the Executive Vice-President of a leading private bank defines, “Microfinance business is not only about making money but also bringing smiles to people at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Aligning with this mindset, banks and MFIs offer collateral-free loans to the underbanked rural population for their sustainable livelihood. They aim to expand financial inclusion and nurture especially women customers due to their habit of saving, wise spending, and timely repayment.

Unfortunately, such people-centric initiatives also encounter challenges that the microfinance sector struggles to overcome with conventional methods.

• Poor education levels of rural clients impede sales reps from conveying their valuable services and enhancing the gross loan portfolio. So, the MFI outreach remains as low as 8%, and employee turnover increases to 60%.
• Again, 70% of the marginalized population cannot manage their debts and suffer from late payments, loan defaults, and bad debts. This reduces client retention to only 28% and affects the institution’s working capital, profit, and growth.
• Since most SLI sales teams work out of Tier II and Tier III cities, enabling them with real-time data is a challenge. Their managers find it difficult to monitor their activities and understand their challenges, and hence, cannot support them suitably. 

How empowering would it be if a manager could nudge the salesperson who is on his way to a meeting, saying, “Why don’t you also meet Y?” or “Remember, X’s payment is due, and you are 1 km away”. This would be a game-changer!

Well, such revolutionary approaches are now just a click away!

How can digitization help sales teams manage SLI at their fingertips?

Integrated mobile-first sales engagement platforms help microfinance institutions transform their manual sales processes into digital ones. They allow sales executives to manage large remote workforces across rural India and maximize their loan remittances with optimum collection turnaround times.

Thus, adopting such new-age sales engagement and lead management interfaces can make your life easier with the following benefits:

End-to-end credit remittance and repayments

A sales engagement platform for banks helps sales managers identify their target audience, set daily and monthly goals for sales reps, and increase conversion rates. They automatically capture the frequency of visits and time spent on each customer, track all workflow stages, correlate activities with outcomes, and identify and analyze real-time gaps.

These features help field agents optimize their routes, meet more clients in a single visit, minimize time spent in manually-documenting data, and utilize data-driven prescriptive nudges to drive healthy customer engagement. Sales reps can onboard and engage more clients, communicate real-time contextual insights to their managers, and enhance sales productivity and collection efficiency to meet their goals.

Increased visibility

Sales executives need real-time visibility to all key metrics for their teams, aggregates, and individuals. A banking sales solution helps them track rep performances, assign the best rep available for maximum lead conversion, guide the best rep to nurture the nearest prospect in the territory, and fine-tune enterprise sales with data analytics and rep behavior.

Managers can access reports on key industry scenarios, observe the core capabilities of their sales teams, improve teams’ daily activities by 4X through real-time interventions, and empower sales conversations with relevant knowledge kits and in-the-moment assistance.

Training lady credit officers and field agents

Catering to women customers requires female field agents proficient in identifying customer pain points and conveying valuable services in their local languages. An effective sales acceleration platform is their on-the-go guide to convince more customers and convert more leads.

These platforms provide ongoing coaching to identify potential risks or opportunities, forecast the probability of closures, and keep pace with customers’ evolving needs. Lady credit officers can engage in group sessions, learn strategy-making from the best reps, serve clients with dynamicity, and close more deals with a 75% reduction in the TAT.

Intelligent lead management systems

A banking CRM software with integrated lead management facilities ensures best-fit mapping, seamless customer onboarding, team behavior mining, and a 54% decline in lead dropping. It helps managers nudge customers for timely repayments, aggregate lead information for verifying credibility, inform the lead generators about deal statuses, and quicken turnaround times by lending money to the right customers. Intelligent lead management allows field agents to increase sales efficiency and managers to obtain a unified view of customer journeys.

Customer engagement optimization

Insurance CRM software solutions organize leads obtained from business correspondents, NGOs, enterprises, and lead generators. They ensure optimum financial education to the clients, assign hot leads to the employed workforce, reduce loan disbursement times by 64%, and help achieve 99% repayments on collection due dates.

Additionally, banking CRM software allows sales executives to hire the right talent, build capacities, and track planned versus completed activities. Real-time KPI monitoring and pre-emptive intervention in case of anomalies help sales reps improve outcomes and offer superior customer services.

Final Say

Innovative technologies assist microfinance institutions in expanding their client coverage, managing stakeholders based on business potentials, and enhancing customer sourcing two-fold.

Leading BFSI players in India leverage high-performing sales engagement platforms to overcome their SLI roadblocks and increase total closed cases by 35X, input effort productivity by 2.5X, and the total amount collected by 42X within a few months.

Such one-pane interfaces are “personal sales assistants” to managers and sales reps that bring all parties on the same page, measure productivity, integrate third-party apps, manage debts, and make the initiative profitable.