BukuWarung is a fintech company and super-app offering digital bookkeeping, payments, stock management, and other related solutions to micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia. Boasting a customer base of 6.5 million businesses (and counting), BukuWarung is used by merchants across all districts in Indonesia.

They help merchants become more efficient and organized by enabling them to digitize their offline processes. BukuWarung is leading the digitization of the MSMEs in Indonesia.

Challenge

Being market leaders in their space, BukuWarung is the go-to mobile app for millions of Indonesian MSMEs looking to digitize their day-to-day business processes. The company wanted to optimize the delivery process and reduce costs for one-time passwords (OTPs). Improving this process was vital from a business perspective. Users not being able to sign up or confirm transactions swiftly meant that their revenue was being hurt directly.

The company receives more than 200,000 monthly requests to open new accounts from merchants with different smartphones and mobile devices, spread all over Indonesia (including remote areas with slow internet connectivity).

Anytime a new user attempted to sign up or log in, BukuWarung gave them the option to obtain their OTP through WhatsApp or SMS. Their product team wanted to test which of the two channels worked best in terms of OTP deliverability and conversions (i.e. users putting in their correct one-time passwords). However, to run this experiment and optimize their process, they had to find a suitable vendor.

Solution

BukuWarung’s goal was to test the delivery and optimize conversion rates (i.e., instances of deliveries resulting in users putting in their correct OTPs) for WhatsApp and SMS one-time passwords. After evaluating several options, BukuWarung opted for Bird to help them run this experiment. Bird’s solutions allowed them to work with multiple channels and the right reporting tools, while being cost-effective.

The experiment was an A/B test. One-half of the users who requested new accounts received their OTPs through SMS, whereas the other half received them over WhatsApp.

Since WhatsApp is a popular communication channel in Indonesia, the initial hypothesis was that it would outperform SMS. Surprisingly, the results showed otherwise, with SMS outperforming WhatsApp conversion rates, thanks to Bird relationships with carriers in the region.

How it looks

Based on these findings, they concluded that SMS should be the primary channel. However, at the same time, they didn’t want to completely disregard WhatsApp.

The product team agreed that the most optimized verification process would be to:

• First, send the OTP through SMS.

• Then, use WhatsApp as the “fallback solution” in case the user isn’t able to provide the correct OTP received through SMS.

If a user does not provide their correct OTP within 30 seconds of receiving it via SMS, they get the option to request it again via SMS or WhatsApp.

Results

With the help of Bird, BukuWarung was able to increase the OTP conversions by ~15% to approximately 97%.

The company is now able to smoothly verify hundreds of thousands of merchants every month. This is no small feat, especially considering that many of those merchants are scattered across remote regions of Indonesia and use different mobile devices.

"We picked Bird because their platform helped us experiment faster with different channels. They also have a deeper presence and great relationship with carriers in the region. This was critical to optimize OTP deliverability and conversions."

Chinmay Agrawal, Product Manager