KYC Market Research - Operations

Abstract

My market research internship began at ApplyBoard in the second week of May on a project called “KYC Market Research”. We spent the first week doing competitor analysis and understanding the history and background of the organization. After getting a fair understanding of the market, we were explained the objectives of the research. Then we moved on to drafting the questionnaires for our two target sets – recruitment partners and student, both the customers of ApplyBoard. We had to frame the questions keeping in mind the four roleplays we were going to play in front of the recruitment partners – a student, a sub-agent, a potential new recruitment partner and an ApplyBoard Research Team Member. For the students, we had to target student who were planning to go abroad for studies, who had applied to foreign universities and who were already studying overseas. We spent the rest of the month collecting data through Google forms and telephonic conversations after acquiring the contact information of the target set independently from resources available online. We then proceeded to sort the data and analyze it using MS Excel and then present it into charts and graphs for easier analysis. We spent days sorting the data to ensure maximum efficiency and accuracy. After preparing the data into charts and graphs, we moved on to chalk out initial insights and observations. We spent a lot of time on this process in order to ensure that the observations are crisp. This led to a really good first-cut draft of recommendations which was presented to the senior management of the company. They appreciated our efforts and raised some additional questions which we then included in our follow-up survey which we floated among the target set. During the end of the tenure, the data of the follow-up survey was sorted and drafted into presentable format and a final PPT was made and submitted to the project manager.