Gold is the second form of currency being used in India. For decades now, Indian families have looked at gold as a safe investment option, making procuring loans against gold as mortgage common practice. Since gold is a precious commodity with consistently fluctuating market rates, and purity/weightage an external analyst/ assayer is required to determine the price of the gold. For this, banks often tie up with nearby jewellers that send their professionals to bank to determine a fair rate based on the quality, purity and weight of the gold being offered up as security for the loan.

Why the need to automate?

Being one of India's leading banks, the customer has access to a plethora of applications and automated workflows set up for their employees. This however does not work well in the case of vendor management as vendors are external parties to the organisation, working on a part time basis.

The bank started finding the process of coordination with assayers increasingly time consuming and difficult. Issues of tracking the amount of time spent by assayers, calculating their monthly commission, keeping track of vendor invoices and settlements became problematic to handle. The bank was looking for a quick and cost effective way of simplifying the vendor management process, without having to add them to their in house system/applications, hence the need for automation.

How Facebook and Quickwork platform helped in automating the vendor management process for gold loans.

Keeping the concerns of the bank in mind, Facebook seemed like the ideal tool to build the automation around. Being one of the most widely used public messenger services, Facebook turned out to be a viable platform for the solution. It allows banks to communicate with vendors without having to share access to official bank applications meant only for employees.

How did it work?

A chatbot was created using our Quickwork platform. This chatbot was used to primarily capture the attendance and gold details for the loan. Typically, the Facebook Messenger would automatically detect location using GPS anytime an assayer would visit a branch, this would act as verification proof, allowing assayers to log attendance only based on their location, using Geo-fencing. Post logging the attendance, the chatbot would ask the assayer details of the customer; the name of the customer and the details for the value at which their gold rate was calculated. Bank managers and concerned employees would then be able to access and authorise these actions carefully, with the help of a dashboard. The Quickwork platform seamlessly integrated Facebook Messenger with the dashboard, making it easy for bank employees to view the data easily.

How did it help?

Connecting Facebook Messenger with a dashboard, helped in automating the entire process of capturing information seamlessly. Here’s a holistic view of the impact this simple workflow helped create:

• Cutting down administrative time from 5 days to a matter of hours: The bank would usually have to individually connect with the assayers, collate data from monthly reports, verify it against the records and then calculate monthly commission. With Facebook Messenger in place the coordination required was cut down drastically, allowing the bank managers to calculate monthly commission in a matter of hours and saving the bank 4 extra days of work
• Realtime access: With the entire communication model with assayers becoming digitised, the bank was able to smoothly access records in real time. Digital records of conversations helped in quicker and more streamlined access to all the data. It also made monitoring the data easier, as the dashboard provided clear transparency in recording all actions.
• Cost and time effective: Reducing the amount of time an employee needs to spend on a task, automatically reduces costs in the long run, making simple workflow automations a cost effective solution for all, however this solution was also highly cost efficient. Taking an already public and powerful messenger, saved the cost of having to develop an application and the training required to onboard vendors to use this method. The Facebook chat to dashboard made it simple for vendors to log their actions in two simple steps: location sharing, and logging their assessment.
• Streamlined and scalable workflow: Since the automation is built by creating a chatbot and connecting it with a dashboard, the scope to scale and customise the chatbot based on future requirements is very doable. The bank can use the same chatbot to add other kinds of third party consultants and build/integrate questions to match their field simply. It also allows for expansion, as there is no set limit on the number of assayers/members that can access the chat.

Building automated workflows with Quickwork

At Quickwork, we like finding new ways for making your work simpler. Using automation and messaging we were able to deliver a completely streamlined solution to the bank, assisting them with a cost and time efficient model that is easy to use, and open to adapt based on future needs. Similarly, we make it our mission to understand how our customers work and help build Journeys that compliment and simplify their workflow. Get in touch with us to know more about leveraging messaging platforms, automation and integration to streamline your workflow!