Reflection- Mind Mapping

Challenge

At my previous internship, as a Business Development Intern, my work was to bring potential clients to the company. I worked at a financial giant which offered Mutual Funds, SIPs and various other long-term investment policies. The company had not been getting sufficient response from the customers when the employees integrated with them. After interacting with a few customers and engaging them in situational conversation, we found out the pain points. For starters, people often got disinterested when they received continuous calls from various companies pitching their own policies. Second, the policies which our company pitched were not beneficial for the middle class customer but for the high-end customers. We realised that the customer base in the market is mostly middle class and it was important to alter the poilicies as per their need and requirement.

Selection

Our team had already researched and had gone through the “ What is? “ phase. It was time to do some mind-mapping to bridge what is to what if. Mind Mapping is looking for patterns and insight from a large amount of data which we found during what is. It helps in establishing criteria for what if idea generation process.

Application

To put our Mind-Map structure together, we decided to put in all the facts, figures, data, pain points and challenges upfront. We started brainstorming but weren’t able to land something worth moving forward with. We realised that idea generation should be data driven and collaborative too when brainstorming. So we made a plan to first individually come up with potential policies and plans which would benefit the consumer as well as the company. This exercise involved taking into consideration all the aspects which we had previously figured out. After this, the whole team sat together and individually shared their plan to obtain a more refined plan. While doing this, we also decided on what strategy to be used while interacting with the customer, so that he gets interested and becomes convincing. Soon we came up with a policy of a lesser amount which was affordable to the customer and provided enough incentives to get them interested.

Insight & Approach

Getting closer to the customer’s life and perspective helped us in idea generation which was later tested as a prototype and turned out to be successful. The mind mapping tool helped us collect every information more precisely which further assisted in coming up with a more effective and efficient strategy. We figured out where we lacked and needed improvement. Additionally, we were able to look into the major challenges which the company had been

facing, i.e., customer satisfaction. This helped us improve in not just the financial services , but also the broking services.

Given that we had already gone through the what is process, i believe, we could have made that more interactive and appealing. It might have yielded more useful information, resulting in a better mind map.

