Background:

Bidco Africa is one of East Africa’s leading FMCG manufacturers. With over 50 brands spread across product lines like edible oils, fats, margarine, laundry bars, detergents, personal care products, food and beverages and animal feeds, Bidco is steadily growing and aims to capture the African market as the leading manufacturer for FMCG by 2030.

Challenge:

Bidco Africa believes its growth trajectory over the years has been inspired by its firm belief in a strategic route to market. By making its partners a key player in its journey of success, Bidco Africa has been able to identify the direst needs of the market and stepped-up efforts to offer long lasting solutions.

To enable its partners in the distribution chain seamlessly have a win-win business relationship, Bidco Africa uses centralized information management systems to store all the information pertaining to their products, Partner records, payments, and invoices. Sharing and exchanging information with the partners spread across the African continent helped to address challenges such as:

  • A large team required to handle queries over email and phone.
  • No access to real-time information to partners.
  • Manual follow-ups for payments from partners.

The company was looking for a solution that provides a secure way to access information and seamlessly interact with its partners.

Solution:

Quickwork solved this problem by connecting Information securely with WhatsApp enabling partners to exchange information with the company.

WhatsApp being one of the leading messaging applications in the world is very popular in the African continent. This was the reason Bidco Africa chose to integrate with WhatsApp on the front end to access the information.

How the solution was implemented?

Quickwork built a Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbot which was integrated with Bidco Africa's WhatsApp number. WhatsApp chatbot solution acts as the frontend messenger where partners can connect with Bidco Africa using their registered phone number, and extract information from their database.

  • Bidco Africa has one single number through which every dealer can reach them using WhatsApp chat.
  • The chatbot uses NLP to detect the nature of any query which is sent by a partner.
  • Every message sent is recorded on platform.
  • The chatbot provides instant information to the partner regarding their purchase history, due payments, current turnover, and offers available for the products.

Impact- how the solution benefits Bidco Africa:

  • Provides transparency while maintaining privacy: Bidco Africa provides information needed by partners with transparency when it comes to their own purchases, while ensuring the privacy from all the others.
  • Real-time solution: The chatbot provides partners with answers from the most updated records. They can now track their payments, dues, order status in real time.
  • Reduces the need for human assistance: The chatbot provides partners with a platform to access information needed frequently.  This reduces the number of inbound phone calls and any need for human intervention from Bidco Africa.
  • Quick setup: The setup time for Quickwork was only two weeks to get the entire process set up and running for Bidco Africa.
  • Cost efficient: There was zero capex spent in building a custom app or building an integration. Bidco Africa only bears opex charges for actual number of transactions made in a month, which makes the solution very cost efficient.
  • Easy to use: The Chatbot built on WhatsApp offers great user experience to partners since it offers querying and conversations in natural language.

Streamlining business workflows:

At Quickwork we believe that every customer is different, and hence they deserve their own tailor made solution to match their needs. Whether it’s a workflow to help connect a manufacturer to their partners with ease, or a business looking to provide their managers with quick dashboard and reports, with business workflow automation you can achieve your goal more smoothly. Get in touch with us to get started with automated workflows that work for you!