This week, it was time to hit the road and talk to some folks. The steps were as follows:
1) Find an opportunity - With an aim of becoming an impact sociologist, I decided to focus on social responsibility and financial services. I designed a simple questionnaire to assess where people stand in relation to these concepts.
2) Figure out who might have the unmet need - Financial services impacts everyone in different ways from collegians dealing with student loans, to individuals figuring out what insurance to purchase, to businesses looking to secure financing for growth. Hence, I wanted to talk to anyone and everyone who is willing to share their thoughts in order to understand the unique needs of different types of people.
3) Come up with a list of questions. I came up with a list of 5 questions that attempted to understand what people believe social responsibility is all about and how they relate it to financial services.
4) Go talk to customers! I spoke to 5 people who I had never met before. 2 were young adults and the other 3 were college students.
5) Tell us what you learned about the opportunity. I have learned that the concept of social responsibility does not have a common definition yet. People perceive it differently. I also learned that people are not able to articulate their feelings about social responsibility and financial service clearly because they probably haven't thought about it in detail. Finally, everyone seemed to feel that social responsibility is important and necessary.
6) Tell us what you learned about interviewing customers. I learned that it is not safe to assume that people know something that I may know or even understand a concept that feels quite common to me. Additionally, pretty much everyone was very nervous talking on video preferring to be recorded on audio only.
You can listen to the 5 interviews below.
Erin
Juliana
Lorena
Melanie
Hello Farrukh,
ReplyDeleteTo begin with, I love your opportunity: Social responsibility and financial services. If I were asked to answer your questions, I would probably have not been able to answer because the definition of social responsibility is ambiguous. I know what it is, but it is hard to tell someone about it. Since you have learned what to improve on your questions, I am pretty sure that you will do a great job next week! I would like you to visit my blog and give me feedback on my interview with customers. It is http://bongjukang.blogspot.com/2016/01/customer-interviews-no-1.html
Hi Farrukh,
ReplyDeleteI can definitely identify behind your idea. I've worked in banking and currently in insurance; I am also very passionate about social justice. I can totally support a great opportunity to combine social responsibility and financial services. I would suggest probably forming a nonprofit or a consulting firm that can connect the dots of making big firms more approachable to their client base by sharing knowledge of making wise financial decisions. I can tell you that during my time at BB&T Bank, I worked directly with an organization called EverFi, which helped financial firms support grassroots projects that have immediate effects in the community by doing all the "leg work" for the firms. You can visit their webpage at https://everfi.com to try to get an idea of what type of work they are doing so you can probably see what they are doing right or wrong, or shape your idea entirely differently from what they do.
I must say that I was somewhat disappointed that you did not have any videos for your interviews.
You can read my post about my idea here: http://juansesoto.blogspot.com/2016/01/customer-interviews-no-1.html