Postponing Registration (ATA Experiment 101)

PxD is partnering with Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to help improve the effectiveness of their voice-based mobile-phone advisory service, the 8028 hotline, by conducting continuous iterations and experiments, as well as by making suggestions for improvements to and customization of the service. The service has millions of registered farmers and represents the first in Africa to be maintained by a government entity at such a large scale.

The 8028 hotline Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system uses phone key navigation. First-time callers to the 8028 hotline are prompted to register by selecting their preferred language, and their region, zone, and woreda, before accessing any content. This registration process delays access to the core informational content of the IVR system and has been found to compromise the accuracy of the registration information that is collected. Specifically, while 85% of users correctly reported their region, only 65% accurately reported their zone, and just 15% provided correct woreda information. To address this issue, we implemented an experiment in which users in the treatment group, after selecting their language, bypassed the registration process and were immediately directed to the top menu to access content. Postponing registration significantly increased the share of users accessing content, from 52% to 63%. Based on these findings, the registration step was postponed to gather profile information in a later call.