Listening Report 2022 - What we learnt from the people our entrepreneurs serve

By Roopa Kudva, Varad Pande, Priya Sharma, Twinkle Malhan

Listening to whom we serve is a powerful way to understand our impact. By doing so, we can really tune in to people’s context and experience, to unearth information that strengthens some of our and our investees’ hypotheses and actively challenges others. It offers us a window into how our investees are creating lasting change and where the gaps persist.

Omidyar Network India’s commitment to creating a holistic impact on India’s Next Half Billion (NHB) begins with understanding the challenges faced by this segment and investing in organisations that design solutions addressing these challenges.

With this in mind, Omidyar Network India (ONI) and 60 Decibels launched a systematic listening initiative in 2019, to support our entrepreneurs with customer data and to have an ‘ear to the ground’ about the evolving journey of India’s NHB. The objectives of this exercise were twofold:

1. Help our entrepreneurs do even better in serving their customers every day

2. Help us listen directly from our ‘end-customers’ and capture their evolving needs, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours, so we can get better at serving them.

This year we have expanded the effort to listen to over 5,500 end-customers from across 20 states served by 23 investee organisations that jointly reach 130 Mn Indians*. While we continue to measure our impact year-on-year, this year we have also captured data on digital barriers faced by the NHB and tried to gauge how the ongoing pandemic is affecting India.

The insights that follow are some of our key learnings from all these conversations. We are also sharing examples of where organisations are changing their customer-centric strategies based on the learnings from these conversations.

Read the report below or download it as a PDF here.