Success Story: How ITC E-Choupal revolutionized the lives of 4 million+ farmers

Agriculture is the backbone of the Indian economy, yet it is still far from progression. 

The reason? Most of the farmers in remote places fail to get access to advanced technology and eventually, their yields are not up to the mark. However, organizations like ITC are proactively taking initiatives to reach as many farmers as possible and provide them with the necessary resources needed for agricultural practices and development. But reaching such a huge number of farmers, especially in remote areas wasn’t an easy task. 

Their success story is an amalgamation of hard work and smart work. The perfect blend of their efforts and the use of the right set of technology from MyOperator have made them reach where they are today. 

Let’s uncover how they made a mark. 

What is ITC e-Choupal? 

e-Choupal is an initiative by the Agri-Business Division of ITC limited, to ensure an efficient and sustainable supply chain and deliver value to its customers around the world. 

Launched in June 2000, ‘e-Choupal’, has already become the country’s largest initiative among all Internet-based interventions in rural India. Their services currently reach out to more than 4 million farmers located in over 35000 villages. 

Requirements 

e-Choupal was designed to reach out to the farmers, who in most cases are located in remote and inaccessible areas of rural India. Herein, one of the major attributes that had to be checked was smooth telecom connectivity. ITC wanted to set up an on-call helpdesk for the farmers who’d be calling them from different regions inquiring about agricultural information and supplies.

ITC, in fact, had prepared a structure wherein their executives too would reach out to the farmers to impart knowledge and agricultural equipment. Needless to say, they wanted to supervise these on-call conversations to get useful insights into the challenges faced by the farmers.  

Toll-free number 

ITC Chaupal’s first preference was to provide an easily accessible helpdesk to their callers. As these were farmers from remote places ITC choose MyOperator’s toll-free number. This 1800 number gave it a unified image and made the helpdesk accessible to farmers 24*7 for free. This made it easier for ITC to reach as many farmers as possible and easier for farmers as well to reach out for help. 

IVR 

The toll-free number was facilitated with the IVR menu as well per the prerequisite of ITC Choupal. An IVR menu was extremely crucial to handle large volume calls and manage them without any complications. The simplified solution enabled the farmers to connect with their concerned departments directly based on the IVR menu options. Furthermore, it has reduced the burden of the staff of attending and transferring calls manually. 

Recording and reporting 

The cloud telephony solution for ITC is also facilitated with recording and reporting solutions. All the incoming and outgoing calls are recorded and stored for record and supervision. The live panel provides updates every few minutes and facilitates the manager to efficiently monitor the calls in real-time and give constructive feedback as well. 

CRM integration

In order to take the e-Choupal call-handling process a step further, the MyOperator solution was also integrated with the in-house CRM of ITC. As a result, the complete history of callers was shown to the agents in real-time, significantly saving their efforts to search/ask for the information again.

MyOperator call center software thus streamlined and advanced all the telecom operations of e-Choupal, relieving their team of all hectic tasks related to calls. Along with this, the provided helpline number acted as an easily accessible mode of communication for the farmers to connect with the e-Choupal team. 

The growth was immense. ITC Choupal was able to bring a huge change in the lives of 4 million+ farmers and they continue to do so with the help of MyOperator cloud call center solution.