Listening to Clients: How to Better Serve Your Customers
This paper discusses the 'Listening to Clients' series, which combines both USAID's AIMS/SEEP Learning from Clients Manual and MicroSave's Market Research for Microfinance Tools (MR4MF):
- The series provides MFIs with the means to learn how to understand their clients using a mix of these methods.
The paper states that as the microfinance market has become more competitive, microfinance service providers need to pay much more attention to consumer preferences and priorities in defining what and how financial services should be delivered. It highlights that the 'Listening to Clients' series is audio-visual step-by-step training in qualitative and quantitative client assessment. Each lesson uses video clips embedded in PowerPoint as part of the interactive training in market research and data collection and analysis. The series consists of nine market research modules. These include:
- Client satisfaction;
- Exit survey;
- Financial landscape analysis;
- Financial sector trend analysis;
- Life-cycle analysis;
- Loan and savings use survey;
- Relative preference ranking;
- Seasonality analysis;
- Simple ranking/ product attribute ranking.
The paper concludes that:
- The 'Listening to Clients' Series can be used to obtain client information from existing and potential clients.
- The flexibility of the tools permits them to be readily adapted to a wide variety of issues including product development and product refinement as well as assessments of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
