Field Guide to Obtain Customers’ Views on Empowerment

This toolkit provides guidance for discussing with customers of financial service providers (FSPs) about their understanding of "customer empowerment." It suggests that the term empowerment is multidimensional and context and culture specific and FSPs should not talk to customers directly about empowerment. The toolkit presents a framework that breaks empowerment down into a number of dimensions that can be explored in order to build a picture of the experience of specific groups of customers. The underlying hypothesis for this toolkit is that a more dynamic customer provider relationship that is based on trust and that builds customer confidence will help reduce the problem of inactivity and will result in a win-win situation for both providers and customers. The toolkit was developed and refined through field testing in India and it covers the following sections in detail:

• Setting up interviews with a focus on profiling people to interview, sampling, logistics for focus group discussions, and individual interviews;
• Usable research approaches with a focus on methods, research questions, and framework of issues to probe;
• Conducting focus group discussions and individual interviews with a focus on introducing research to participants and customer empowerment statements;
• Data capture and analysis.