Today, we are excited to announce the availability of Microsoft Kaizala in Kenya. Kaizala is a mobile app designed to improve the way your business communicates, collaborates and manages workflows, using a simple chat interface.
Microsoft Kaizala gives you the power to connect with large numbers of people inside and outside your organisation. No matter where your employees, customers and suppliers are, you can connect with and draw data from your entire value chain on one single platform — all on your mobile device.
Why is this so important?
In a country like Kenya, there are hundreds of task workers working in construction sites, manufacturing plants, retail shops and other industries. These workers typically don’t have a dedicated work space or computer. Instead, they use pen and paper, or unsecure consumer messaging apps on their personal phones, for work-related communications. For managers, this makes communicating, assigning and tracking work, and collecting information difficult and time consuming.
Kaizala solves the above problem seamlessly. Starting today, it is available for free download as a standalone app for Android and iOS phones.
Welcoming Kaizala to Kenya
We first piloted Kaizala in Kenya in February 2017, when we gave organisations and users an opportunity to review the app and provide feedback. Together with a launch in India and the Philippines, we have validated Kaizala to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes in emerging markets. Kaizala responds to the needs of users, who want to communicate with business contacts and share a secure collaboration space with them on-the-go.
So what exactly can Kaizala do?
Using a simple and intuitive chat interface, organisations can:
- Communicate and collaborate on mobile in a structured and secure way, with enterprise grade compliance and manageability. Connect with employees, front-line workers, customers, suppliers and citizens.
- Have complete ownership of the data with full security, privacy and compliance of the data and the related insights.
- Create large-size flat, hierarchical or public groups in a matter of minutes from contact lists, organisation directories or adhoc sharing. Make public groups easy to discover across different locations and time zones.
- Broadcast and collect information with Kaizala action cards: Share announcements, photos, videos or documents. Collect feedback and data in a structured way from the field through polls or surveys. Assign jobs and tasks, submit expenses, provide training content, mark geo-fenced attendance and track workforces using hyperlocal location tracking.
- Gather rich insights from your data with built-in analytics that help you make more informed decisions. See results in real-time as they come in, organise large amounts of information with an aggregated view of user responses, and get reports at each level of the organisation.
- Use extensibility to integrate Kaizala users with their line-of-businesses to help mobile workforce, customers, suppliers and partners participate in the organisational workflows.
With Kaizala action cards, managers can easily make key announcements, share updates, assign tasks, gather feedback or share top-down information—such as text, photos, videos, or documents—with the entire organisation in just one tap.
Optimised for emerging markets
Because task workers in sub-Saharan Africa often don’t have an email address, Kaizala only requires a mobile number to sign a user up. The app is also optimised to work on any network – including slow 2G networks. Whether your staff is based in the city or a rural community, their experience with Kaizala will be the same.
More than just a chat app – how companies in Kenya are already using Kaizala
Unlike other chat-based apps, Kaizala goes beyond just communication, to enhance business agility, collaboration and organisational productivity, through the use of built-in Kaizala action cards.
During our soft launch in Kenya, Unilever, M-KOPA Solar, Well Told Story and Mawingu all came on board to pilot the app. M-KOPA Solar have been using Kaizala to connect with over 700 of their distributed sales force and collect real-time data and location information. Combined with Kaizala’s automated report feature, this has cut down M-KOPA’s data compilation from a 6 – 8 hour job, to one that takes under a minute.
Well Told Story is using Kaizala as a research tool, putting it into the hands of their network of young people to run surveys and interviews for them. This empowers the youth with jobs and income, while also giving Well Told Story the rich insights that fuel their youth media business.
Using Kaizala on mobile or desktop PC, managers can easily organise large amounts of information, generate automated reports and analytics, and create groups.
With Kaizala, your conversations and data are always safe
Rest assured that when using Kaizala, managers have full control and owndership over all their data and information. You can decide who has access to company data, which is all protected by encryption in-transit and at-rest. Every piece of data generated on Kaizala is stored in Microsoft Azure datacenters, which adhere to industry standard security and compliance certifications.
Start using Microsoft Kaizala today
Download Kaizala through your app store and start exploring what it can do for your business. You can use the built-in action cards, or create your own custom cards based on your organisation’s needs. You can also email [email protected] to get a preview (after NDA and Terms & Conditions) of our developer SDK to build your own extensions to Microsoft Kaizala.
Learn more at www.microsoft.com/kaizala.
