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REGION:
Uganda, Kenya
INDUSTRY:
Supporting Small Enterprises, Transportation
Tugende is a social enterprise, which uses asset financing, technology and robust customer support to help micro, small and medium-sized enterprises own income-generating assets. Tugende’s core product is a lease-to-own/hire-purchase package for motorcycle taxi drivers in Uganda and Kenya. Initially, entrepreneurs were offered training, medical and life insurance, safety equipment and hands-on support. Tugende then added new asset finance products like vehicles, boat engines and equipment for retail shops.
The social enterprise has served over 35,000 clients with more than 13,000 achieving full ownership of at least one asset. Tugende’s financing program provides support to people generally unable to access traditional credit providers. Asset ownership allows Tugende customers to save money they’d normally spend renting equipment and provides accumulated savings in the value of a paid-off motorcycle or other asset. With these new-found financial resources, customers have improved their economic standing by investing in new businesses, buying land and building houses and getting better health care and education for their children.
Tugende needed to streamline and scale its time-consuming, manual collection of data gathered when registering potential clients and assessing their creditworthiness. In addition to enrolling program applicants and collecting data on their current financial situation, Tugende field agents regularly traveled to remote areas with little connectivity to gather references from neighbors and financial information from people the would-be customers identified as guarantors of their debt.
All of this field data written on printed forms would then be entered by hand into the social enterprise’s Salesforce CRM when field team members returned to their office. Tugende also needed a method of verifying when and where its credit officers made these site visits as well as a way to equip its security and collections team with a reliable and real-time process of recording customer payments or conducting driver and vehicle safety inspections.
TaroWorks’ helped Tugende digitize its paper-based data collection system by developing forms that field team members can download to their mobile device through our field service app when in range of the internet or a mobile data connection. The app is then used offline to collect information from far-flung locations and to upload the data to Tugende’s Salesforce cloud database when back in range of connectivity, avoiding the laborious task of data entry.
TaroWorks’ GPS system is also used to record the time and place of field visits and additional functionality allows field agents to capture digital signatures and photographs for verification. Finally, our mobile app’s drill down hierarchy makes it easy for Tugende team members to be assigned individual customers whose records they can quickly view without having to wade through multiple customer lists.
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