
Creating jobs through digitisation
How a simple WhatsApp chatbot has the power to connect the next six million entrepreneurs to life-changing earning opportunities.
Engineering | Feersum Engine | Content | Client Partnership

Avon is a company that puts mascara on lashes and food on tables. How, we hear you ask? By giving millions of women the opportunity to earn money selling Avon and Justine products.
But where would one even begin the journey to become an Avon Beauty Entrepreneur? Well, the answer is simple – WhatsApp.
We partnered with Avon back in April to begin a relationship that always had the potential to change lives. In this case, the change came through a simple WhatsApp chatbot that digitised the signup process for Avon and Justine Beauty Entrepreneurs – or “reps” as they’re known in the big, bad, old school world.
With WhatsApp already being the most used app in South Africa, the audience was already there – all we had to do was build the functionality.
Features and the future
While the first release of the bot allowed users to sign up as reps, buy products, and get info – all while tracking data for analytics – it’s the future of bots just like this one that’s getting us all giddy.
How does the future look?
Not too long from now, brands will be able to recruit seamlessly across multiple countries. We could soon be communicating with current recruits on a much bigger scale, and adding features such as self-service, support, balance and order checking, and even earnings calculators.
Empowering call centres
This kind of digitisation can get a bad rep sometimes, but people seem to be missing the positive side of it. Besides making call centres 10 times more efficient and cost-effective, it empowers agents with more data to make their jobs easier, and more time to take on more meaningful tasks.
This is one of the first steps in our digital revolution, and it’s a big one in the right direction. The future of Avon – and its Beauty Entrepreneurs – is brighter than ever.
370 000
Messages
in the first month
12k
Unique interactions
in the same time