Kaizala: Chat Up Your Productivity!

By Anup Purohit, CIO, YES BANK

Anup Purohit, CIO, YES BANK

In today’s world, timely and effective communication powered by collaboration has become the key. If one looks at the timeline of communication, we have progressed from the now nearly obsolete physical letters which were punctuated with long delivery times and formal language. This was followed by emails which reduced the time lag significantly while still maintaining the formal language. With the advent of mobile and social channels, communication have been completely transformed with quick, short and informal messages.

Naturally businesses have been agile enough to embrace this change. Businesses nowadays are practically being run on social chats and less on emails, to ensure immediate communication and response. Right from peer group collaboration to work assignment, policy updates, and information seeking, there are numerous innovative ways to use these platforms. However, traditionally there have been three major drawbacks:

1. While chat platforms have been good for quick collaboration, they have been found wanting when it comes to interacting with enterprise applications or collating structured information, thus forcing organizations to implement a plethora of ‘Productivity Apps.’

2. All these productivity tools have still been ‘IT Led’ in terms of using it for any new purpose.

3. Lastly, since most of these tools are social platforms, there have been a lot of concerns around security, privacy, and organization’s ability to manage confidentiality.

Enter Microsoft Kaizala—a mobile chat app cum productivity platform. Kaizala seamlessly blends the collaboration ease of social chat platforms with new age ‘action forms’ aimed at automating requirements of large enterprises. It’s a perfect amalgam of SMAC—a Social Mobile Only App, delivered via Azure Cloud with in-built analytics and reporting. It is easily integrated with Microsoft In tunes to provide security and complete control to organizations.

With Microsoft Kaizala, it’s easy for the organizations to connect the entire value chain including its employees, outsourced partners, suppliers and customers.

Businesses nowadays are practically being run on social chats and less on emails, to ensure immediate communication and response

With existing chat platforms, you can broadcast to your audience, however you cannot get the replies in a structured format. Herein likes Microsoft Kaizala’s core strength. It provides many in-built frameworks for the business users, empowering them with the ability to create natural work groups, add people, and create hierarchies, broadcast information— such as announcements, photos, videos, or documents collect data from the field through structured polls, forms, and surveys, assign tasks and track them. Business users can obtain and analyze the information centrally on the portal.

YES Bank has partnered with Microsoft to pioneer the usage of Kaizala in banking and have engineered multiple functionalities to power numerous use cases:

• Salesforce enablement: This is the single largest use case in the Bank. Kaizala with its on-the-fly capability to create survey and forms has empowered sales people to collect data, enter leads, and to work upon them resulting in 2-2.5x productivity gain.

• Channel and Customer Service: We are tying up the entire value chain by enabling our sales teams, customers, and partners to raise tickets directly from Kaizala, integrating it with the CRM at the back end.

• HR Communication: YES Bank has enabled HR related communication and notifications on Kaizala which allows employees to (1) Directly communicate and seek relevant details on HR enquiries (2) Receive all important policies and announcements.

• Payments: Kaizala is integrated with YES Bank’s UPI system enabling P2P money transfer. The UPI ecosystem is fast evolving and UPI 2.0 will bring in more exciting use cases.

• Chatbot: The Bank is testing the use of Buddy Bot for employees. The Buddy Bot answers queries related to products, policies, and department specific processes.

Kaizala has given an added impetus to YES Bank’s “Banking the Unbanked” program.

It has been a blessing to our financial inclusion teams who are effectively using Kaizala for getting faster feedback and response from Business Correspondents [BC]. These correspondents operate from remote corners of the country and compiling their data used to earlier take around 7-10 days. With Kaizala it is now a real-time process which enables the team to provide effective feedback to the agent on the field thereby increasing productivity and offering better solutions to our customers.

Kaizala as a single platform has freed up our organization from rolling out multiple employee productivity apps. Business users have readily embraced it and are coming up with new innovative use cases every single day. Kaizala is truly a power packed chat application.

Insights on the applicability of Kaizala at YES BANK and the BFSI industry at large:

Real time Sales force administration, providing digital productivity enhancing platforms, effective dissemination of organizational information, real time interactions with customers, and development of self-service channels are key business problems that for the entire Service Industry at large.