During 18 months of the COVID pandemic, the use of digital payments increased significantly, resulting in a 2X increase in support calls. Since Innoviti provides payment solutions to over 20,000 stores of India’s top enterprise merchants across 2000 cities, managing more than 2M transactions every day, Innoviti saw the effects of this change first hand. Earlier cash was always an option for a cashier to suggest to the customer if the payment systems were erratic, but now that was ruled out. Even though Innoviti’s system reliability was the highest in the industry, it was time to reimagine the technology and support operations again!

To address this, Innoviti launched Project Parivarthan, meaning “Change” in Hindi. The organization assembled the best and most experienced minds to study the people behind the payment. People at the head office, at stores, the consumers, banking support teams etc.

The learnings were simple and revealing:

1. Each merchant runs their operations differently:

How they service customers, how they manage their store staff, their training, rewards, recognition, their HR practices, all differ. Innoviti’s AI team studied this to create a single metric that captured the vibrance of the variations – a Store Health Metric. This became the single metric to track – if it went up, people were happy, if not, we were in trouble.

Next, how do we convert the unhappy folks to happy ones?

2. Field support folks are more entrepreneurial than you can imagine:

They are constantly learning to earn more, willing to try new things. They like to take decisions and to be held responsible for their actions. Recognizing this, allowed Innoviti to switch support operations from push (where tickets were allocated to them) to pull (where they pulled tickets based on impact). An AI-driven engine constantly optimized the Store Health Metric, with a Connect App automating it. The service personnel were now taking decisions, and getting rewarded. They become self managed!

Next, how do we ensure they have all the tools needed to solve issues.

3. Come close, closer to the customer:

With increasing transactions, hardware failures were bound to increase. Innoviti had to move closer to the customer and set up 24 warehouses within 100 km of every store. But they didn’t stop there. They also equipped each support staff with terminals that were centrally connected and could automatically detect the unique configuration of each store within seconds. They carried these in their bags, which were now within hours of each store. We could support replacements in most cities within 4 hours and in 2000+ cities within 24 hours. They started managing issues before they even arose.

The results were impressive:

• Transacting monthly average users increased from 76% to 91% in under a year.
• Support calls per transacting user decreased from 0.5 per month to 0.12 per month in the same year.