What do micro-lenders want?
I asked this question to each of our teammates for my assessment of clarity in communication. I knew I would fail miserably because I never had a simple answer to it. None of us had a simple solution. If it were simple, all of us would be speaking the same language.
Let us reframe it:
“What do we want for our customers? “
Or,
“What do micro-lenders expect from Inkredo?”
It got us thinking harder. The key to being seen, heard, and understood is to take in the ambition of the lenders. What is the intimate desire of a lender?
We have noticed that successful products are so close to the ambition of their users that users cannot think of the dream without the product. So we reframed the question again:
“What is that thing lenders cannot do without Inkredo?”
Or,
“What happens if she gets (or does not get) what she wants? “
If the customer does not get the desired value proposition in the first few seconds of interacting with Inkredo, she will drop out of the product journey. It is the key to being seen, heard, and understood.
What we convey and what customers hear are two different things.Understanding ambition alone is never enough. We also had to understand two more things about lender’s dream:
- challenges coming in the way, and
- what are the steps to overcome it
Now we had another question in front of us.
Why are we trying to understand lenders’ ambitions?
More business? Sounds too obvious, right? Then how are we different from other businesses? How do we get heard?
For this, we have to understand the entire lifecycle of the ambition. Only when we know it could we place ourselves as the best support system to help users achieve it. It is an innate human desire to associate with the best and exhibit an intricate understanding of our problems. A business that gets this finds a sure shot way to users’ hearts.
Behind every lender is a user who not only signs up for analysing bank statements alone but also for the security of one’s job. If Inkredo can show the promise that our users’ job is safe, then we have made an entry into their hearts.
What is the ultimate desire of a lender?
Until not a long time ago, I’ve tried positioning Inkredo’s messaging around finding loan applicants who have both intent and capacity to repay. But it still felt empty. Is this enough to make a decision? There is still an element of doubt if I have to lend or invest. So how do we define this gap?
This gap should pare down to customer’s ambition into a single focus. The ultimate desire of the customer is not just limited to determining repaying capacity or the repaying behaviour; instead, it is:
It’s collections! ZERO NPA.
How can we make collections 100% certainty for our customers? In other words, how can we help micro-lenders automate collections that do not require them to step out of the office? That’s a piece for another day.
How do we know that it is the ultimate ambition?
Let us negate the ambition of collections and see if any lender will survive without it. If customers are poor in collections, they will be soon out of business — future lending capital is directly related to the portfolio’s performance. It’s not only a matter of growth; even their survival becomes highly doubtful. The credit industry and eventually the economy suffers because of it.
We have got it right when Inkredo is the ultimate guide in helping the lender achieve the ultimate dream. We were always there, but we never realised it. It’s like we are breathing every moment, but we don’t realise it until we experience breathlessness!
The customer’s ambition is her dreamland. It’s a human desire to associate with people and organisations that align with our highest of ambitions.
What’s next?
In the coming weeks, we shall further dive into the challenges coming in fulfilling the ambition of lenders. What are the steps needed to overcome the challenges in getting closer to ZERO NPAs? And, last but not least, getting closer to 100% without having any feet on the street.
Initially published in Inkredo’s blog
