Inbound Engagement: Remote Training
IND -20 -1415Last modified on December 19th, 2025 at 10:17 am
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Abstract
PxD operates Ama Krushi, a free agriculture information service delivered over mobile phones, in collaboration with the State Government of Odisha Department of Agriculture, using a two-way Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform with “outbound” push calls and an “inbound” hotline service.
This experiment built on earlier A/B tests aimed at increasing engagement with the inbound service by offering phone-based remote training to a subset of farmers who had previously received reminder and instructional messages. In this experiment we assessed whether combining remote training with reminders would improve farmers’ likelihood of calling into the hotline and asking valid agricultural questions, compared to farmers who received only reminders or no intervention.
Adding remote training meaningfully increased farmers’ engagement with the service, in terms of both call-in rates and the likelihood of asking valid questions. The effect was particularly notable on farmers who were active outbound users and on smartphone users. These results indicate that remote training is a promising complement to reminder messages for enhancing farmer engagement with digital advisory services. -
Status
Completed
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Start date
Q4 Oct 2020
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End date
Q1 Jan 2021
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Experiment Location
India
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Partner Organization
Government of Odisha
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Agricultural season
Kharif, Rabi
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Experiment type
A/B test
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Sample frame / target population
Farmers on the service
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Sample size
8,502
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Outcome type
Information access, Service engagement
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Mode of data collection
PxD administrative data
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Research question(s)
1. Does a combined treatment of reminder messages and remote training increase the number of farmers that ask a valid question on the inbound service?
2. What type of user is the training most effective for? -
Research theme
Communication technology, Service design
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Research Design
Using the same sample of 15,914 farmers from a previous experiment The Effect of Reminder and Instructional Messages on Inbound Engagement, we maintained the control group and randomly assigned treatment farmers from the previous experiment to three new treatment arms. Farmer randomization was stratified along the original treatment groups for the type of reminder messages that farmers previously received, geography, and their engagement with the inbound service during the 10 weeks of the previous experiment. This previous engagement was categorized as: (i) they didn’t call in at all, (ii) they called in but were unsuccessful, meaning they made blank calls or calls under 60 seconds or recorded invalid questions, and (iii) they called and were successful, meaning they accessed a feature for over 60 seconds or recorded a valid question, which was defined as a farmer asking a query related to agriculture.
The groups for this study received the following interventions:
1. Reminder only (n = 5,017): Received a series of five messages from June to August 2020.
2. Reminder + Remote Training (n = 4,502): Received a series of five messages from June to August 2020, and were offered remote training from October to December 2020 to use the inbound service.
3. Reminder + Pest message (n = 2,395): Received a series of five messages from June to August 2020, and received an additional reminder message in October 2020 requesting farmers to share a question or a report of pest incidence on their field via the record-a-question feature.
4. Control (n = 4,000): Did not receive any treatment.Remote training was conducted via live phone calls from trained call center surveyors. Surveyors explained to farmers how to access and use the IVR service, with a focus on how to record a question.
We measured outcome indicators with PxD administrative data, which included the proportion of farmers who:
- called the inbound service,
- called and accessed a feature,
- called and accessed a feature and listened to at least 60 seconds, and
- called and asked a valid question.
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Results
We found that offering remote training combined with reminder messages increased the likelihood of farmers calling the inbound service by 1.3 percentage points (52% increase over the control mean of 2.5%). Furthermore, 2.2% of farmers in the training group asked a valid agricultural question, compared to 0.1% in the control group. Although overall rates were low, these differences suggest that training has a positive effect. The impact was notably stronger among farmers with higher prior outbound engagement (3% asked a question vs. 1.6% for low-engagement farmers) and among smartphone users (3% vs. 1.8% for non-smartphone users).