WORKING PAPER • Janalakshmi’s Nano business loan customers from the Bangalore metropolitan area who were receiving the mobile-phone-based training as part of Phase 2 pilot • The additional criterion we used focused on client’s engagement level with the training product ▫ Engaged Customers: * Clients picking up the phones for the training messages and tending to listen to the majority of the messages ▫ Unengaged Customers: * Clients not picking up the call despite repeated follow-up calls * Clients picking up the call, but hanging up within the first 20 seconds, or showing a high inconsistency in their listenership duration (standard deviation in weekly percentage heard being over 40 percent) We conducted two site visits to India in 2015; the scope, sample selection, and objectives of the interviews was slightly different between the two site visits. For Site Visit 1, we interviewed Janalakshmi Nano business loan clients who at that time had been receiving mobile-phone-based training for five months to learn about their overall experiences with the training. For Site Visit 2, we focused only on Nano business loan clients who haven’t been as engaged with the training program to get a better sense of the root causes of their disengagement, namely measured by their pick-up and message listenership rates. With the support of Janalakshmi’s staff and IFMR, the ideas42 team interviewed 31 Janalakshmi customers, eight engaged customers, and 23 unengaged customers, in 2015. Each interview was about 60 minutes long and was conducted one-on-one with the client, an ideas42 member, and a translator. Before the interview, each interviewee signed a consent form. The feedback interviews covered the following topics: • Site Visit 1: General feedback on the training product in terms of: ▫ Training structure: Call timing, message length, and frequency of training messages ▫ Training content: Ease of understanding the content taught to date and its usefulness for the business ▫ Practice adoption: Which practices have been adopted in the business and which have not and the reasons for adoption vs. nonadoption of these practices • Site Visit 2: Specific feedback on: ▫ Clients’ motivation for picking up the call ▫ Clients’ interaction with the mobile interface and the broadcast messages, with the objective to identify bottlenecks around engagement, be it behavioral or otherwise ▫ Orientation session conducted at the start of the training to introduce clients to the mobile-phone- based training service From the qualitative interviews with engaged clients, we obtained insights about which features of the Phase 2 training design are working and could be leveraged in its next iteration. Talking to unengaged clients gave us an opportunity to probe and understand in detail that specific parts of the training program that did not work for them; this gave the team useful insights and design ideas for tweaks to the training content and delivery structure for the next iteration of the training product. We also were able to deepen our understanding of financial management practices among Indian retail businesses and gain insight about their level of understanding and adoption of heuristics-based financial management practices we taught via the mobile training. The key findings from the site visits are presented in the following section. them 10