Removing the Prompt to Save a Selected Crop to the User’s Profile (ATA Experiment 104)

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. When users call the 8028 hotline, they are prompted to select a crop to hear advisory content. When users select a crop they haven’t added to their profile before, the system prompts users to save the selected crop to their profile, before the system provides advisory content. This prompt was identified as a source of both confusion for users and drop-off from the system. We tested whether removing the prompt to save the selected crop to the user’s profile improved access to content. The intervention resulted in a modest positive effect: a one percentage point (pp) increase in the share of users accessing content, which would translate to approximately 5,000 additional messages accessed per month across all the 8028 hotline users.