Microsoft Kaizala: A communication and productivity tool for India’s mobile workforce

How do you bring quality healthcare to over a billion people across India? That was the challenge Anurag Vohra, Chief Technology Officer, Apollo Tele Health Services had in front of him.

“Since doctors cannot reach every nook and corner of India, Apollo is setting up tele-clinics in all remote locations possible. At these tele-clinics, people can walk in and take consultations with family physicians or if needed, even our specialists via video conferencing,” Vohra says.

However, having operations and staff in remote locations comes with its own set of challenges. First of them is the ability to capture operational data from every tele-clinic remotely and ensure that things are running as they should. More importantly, not everyone in the field had access to a PC and even those who had one could only respond when they were logged into the system.

Vohra and his team wanted something more real-time – a mobile tool that was convenient for their field workers to use on the move and for the backend team to be able to compile reports quickly and act on them.

Apollo Tele Health Services is not alone when it comes to requiring a convenient, secure, and mobile tool for a remote work management environment.

Introducing Microsoft Kaizala—the new mobile app for large group communications and work management

We’re pleased to announce the availability in India of Microsoft Kaizala — a mobile app and service for communicating and coordinating work in large, distributed groups.  By working with customers across India, we validated Kaizala as a compelling solution for mobile-only users in emerging markets.

With Microsoft Kaizala, it’s easy to connect with large numbers of people inside and outside your organization, including employees, customers, and suppliers. Kaizala enables organizations to manage work with their extended teams through a single, unified platform—all on their mobile phone. Starting today, Microsoft Kaizala is available for download as a standalone app for iOS and Android phones.

“The tasks that we were earlier able to do in a week or sometimes even two weeks, we are now able to do daily. We used to have a dedicated person whose job was to compile all the operational data that was coming from these tele-clinics, find out who hasn’t responded, and create a report. With Kaizala’s backend tools, all this happens automatically,” Vohra says.

The challenges for task-based workers

There are hundreds of millions of task workers in India working in construction sites, manufacturing plants, retail shops, and other industries. While critical to the company, they typically don’t have a dedicated work space or computer and generally use pen and paper or unsecure consumer messaging apps on their personal phones for work-related communications. For managers, communicating and assigning and tracking work with them can be difficult and time consuming. Microsoft Kaizala makes this all easier.

Connect with your entire value chain

Many task workers don’t have their own company email address or access to internal tools, which makes it hard for managers to share and collect important information. Microsoft Kaizala enables managers to easily reach very large numbers of users within and outside their organization, using a simple and intuitive chat interface. Organizations can broadcast information – such as announcements, photos, videos, or documents, collect data from the field through polls or surveys, and see real-time analytics as results come in. Users can be quickly onboarded by using just their phone number as a unique ID.

“Microsoft Kaizala is coming up as a good tool where communication becomes two-way. Most of the existing tools have been only one-way where you broadcast to reach out, but you can’t get the replies in the format or shape that you want. We feel Microsoft Kaizala can help us bridge that gap, where we post something and get a quick revert. Then we can quickly compile the results and analyze,” explains Sameer Tandon, Regional Director, UPL Limited, an agro-chemical company.

“We have a lot of partners, distributors and retailers who are not on the company’s email networks and even if we add their email, we will get individual replies. We can connect with them better with Microsoft Kaizala. And being a rural company, our connect with the farmers is very important. As internet usage increases, we believe we will be able to connect farmers directly with the organization via this app,” he adds.

YES Bank, India’s fourth largest private sector bank, is currently using Microsoft Kaizala for coordinating with its field staff and employees.

“At YES Bank, we strongly believe in innovation to bring future technology to present and Microsoft Kaizala is one such platform to reimagine the banking process and digitize it,” says Anup Purohit, Chief Information Officer, YES Bank.

“Earlier our relationship managers had to come to office to get a list of customers to visit, go meet them, and come back the next day to manually fill the information in the system. With Microsoft Kaizala, we have used the survey template and converted it into a relationship management tracker to help our on-field relationship manager to have real-time information about the customers when they meet them. They are then able to update all the information on the fly,” he explains.

Collaborate and manage work efficiently

Microsoft Kaizala makes it easy to coordinate work with a company’s entire value chain – field employees, vendors, partners – with a simple work assignment workflow and real-time status tracking—right within the app. Companies can assign and track frequently-used tasks with built-in Actions for common work scenarios, such as assigning jobs and tracking completion status, sharing and requesting location, submitting bills, and tracking expenses. Managers can also create custom Actions based on their organization’s unique needs.

“I’ve always been a sales person, and I find Microsoft Kaizala to be a very productive tool. When I started out in my career, we had to fill a lot of forms and daily sales report. But with a platform like this, sales people don’t have to do that anymore,” says Pralay Mondal, Group President – Retail and Business Banking, YES Bank.

In the future, YES Bank is looking at using Microsoft Kaizala not only to support its staff but also to connect with its merchant partners and customers in innovative ways that were not possible before.

“We also plan to use Microsoft Kaizala as a service channel for our merchant partners where they can raise an incident or service requests. Our relationship manager will be able to provide a quick resolution on the fly,” says Purohit.

It’s easy to assign tasks to a team member, track and sort task by status, and one-tap “Mark complete”.

Get actionable insights and reporting

With Microsoft Kaizala, you can gather rich insights from your data with built-in analytics that help you make more informed decisions. You can easily organize large amounts of information with an aggregated view of user responses or task status and get aggregated reports at each level of the organization.

“Even for the leadership, the reviewing process becomes a lot easier online. What used to take 7-10 days to compile is now happening on a real-time basis. Not only do we get information in real-time, but we can also give feedback to the team in the field by which they get more productive or can give better solutions to their customers, which could increase their incentives,” says Mondal.

In Apollo Tele Health Services’ case, its field staff can send geo-tagged photos of the remote tele-clinics daily to ensure that the company’s standards of hygiene and upkeep are maintained. Kaizala’s backend implementation compiles it into an automated report and also flags if any data is missing.

Security Organizations can trust

Microsoft Kaizala provides the controlled access and data security that your organization needs. Azure Active Directory services authentication ensures secure access to the Kaizala Management Portal, where IT administrators can control membership of all groups, remove users in one instance, and control user access to sensitive data. Kaizala maintains user privacy and stores data in Azure datacenters that adhere to industry standards for security and compliance.

“Some of the features that we have seen on the app and the dashboard at the supervisor’s level is the ability to create natural work groups, add people, create hierarchies, and upload information which relevant to a particular audience,” says Deodatta Kurane, Group President – Human Capital Management, YES Bank.

Start using Microsoft Kaizala today

Starting today, Microsoft Kaizala is available for download in India as a standalone app for iOS and Android phones. Learn more at www.microsoft.com/kaizala.