Yellow Africa uses Zoho Flow to streamline approval management and increase sales by 50%

The company

Yellow Africa is an asset finance business that has a distributed range of sales agents and merchants to serve rural households with useful solar facilities like radios, charging, lighting, and smartphones. Currently, they operate in five countries and have around 1,000 solar agents, 250 merchants, and 150 operational staff.

The challenge: Approval management was time-consuming

Yellow Africa's operations are primarily sales-agent based. The sales agents are the ones who work to get the products to the customers, and their earnings come through an incentive system. So the money that the agents earn is mainly based on the number of sales they make and the consistency at which their customers make payments.

Yellow Africa uses Upya, a distribution management system that helps the sales agents manage their customers, collect customer information, and complete payments. Before making a sale to a particular customer, the agent collects information about them through Upya.

Once the agent has all the necessary information, they have to get in touch with the management team for approval. This approval process involves a lot of back and forth, where the sales agent has to call the management team manually and see if the sale is approved, rejected, or stalled. With that in place, completing a single sale would take a lot of time for the agents, reducing the number of sales they make and directly affecting their earnings.

The solution: Streamlining the approval management process

While Yellow Africa uses Upya for their approval management, their distribution management is handled using Zoho Creator. The range of abilities that Zoho Creator offers brought them closer to a solution that could make a huge difference. The impact Creator had on their operation also led them to exploring more Zoho products, which eventually helped them find Flow.

"We use multiple applications to manage our processes. Once Zoho Flow came into the picture, all these applications started talking to each other."

Ben WalwynCTO, Yellow Africa

Zoho Flow offered a seamless transfer of data, helping them save a lot of time that was usually spent on waiting for approvals. Yellow Africa built an integration where the information they collect from the customers through Upya is automatically sent through a webhook trigger to the approval system model built in Zoho Creator. This model verifies the customer information and sends the approvals back to Upya immediately. This allows sales agents to get their sale approved instantly, instead of making multiple phone calls and waiting for approval to come through.

"Our approval management process usually took a lot of time, and it made a huge dent on the number of sales made. Zoho Flow helped us get that problem out of the way, and as a result, our agents started selling ten products in the same time it used to take them to sell three."

Ben WalwynCTO, Yellow Africa

This integration was beneficial for the sales agents in other ways, too. Apart from approvals, Yellow Africa also uses Upya to manage their customer payments. Once a payment is made, the details are sent to a commission model built in Zoho Creator. This model calculates the commission an agent earns from a particular payment and sends it back to Upya, so the sales agent can now see how much they earn instantly.

Benefits: Automation directly contributing to revenue

Yellow Africa relies on its sales agents to reduce costs, and the integration abilities that Zoho Flow offers helps them on an operational level. This makes the sales agents' jobs easier and directly contributes to Yellow Africa's cost reduction. Automating their approval process management turned out to be very efficient for Yellow Africa, who saw a huge increase in their sales.

"Zoho Flow has been a game changer for us, providing instant and accurate data that keeps us on top. It's like a coach for our agents, quickly briefing them on their goals—and that's turbocharged our sales by 50%. It doesn't sweat dealing with 60,000+ daily triggers from Upya and 5,000+ Mobile Money transactions."

Ben WalwynCTO, Yellow Africa

Apart from the Upya-Zoho Creator integration, there are other instances where processes like data backup and feedback collection were automated using Zoho Flow. The simplicity that Flow offers in terms of usage makes it an efficient tool for Yellow Africa to explore automation in different ways.