Be the Best!: Do SMS Reminders Improve Banking Agent Performance in Rural India?
We use three randomized experiments to test whether sending behaviorally-informed SMS reminders to banking agents improves their work performance. In particular, we measure the effect of these reminders on agents’ efforts at enrolling customers into the Indian government’s pension and insurance programs. The first randomized experiment, with 3,120 banking agents, focused on increasing enrollments in the pension program using three behavioural framings: appealing to the agents’ personal motivation, appealing to their prosocial motivation, and threatening that their performance was being closely monitored by the bank. We sent these messages either once or thrice a week. We find that sending SMS reminders thrice a week over a 4-week period threatening monitoring increases average pension enrollments by 13.2% per agent, an effect that persists two months after we stop sending messages. We used these results to design the other two experiments, with 3,398 and 1,776 agents working with two banks, to increase enrollment in the insurance programs. SMS reminders increased enrollment in insurance products too, but only for agents working with one of the two partner banks. This bank is known for its commitment to financial inclusion. Overall, our results suggest that SMS reminders can be a cost-effective way to motivate agent performance, but only within a supportive ecosystem. With Krishanu Chakraborty and Karan Nagpal.