Week 1
This first week and a half interning at JIFFI has been filled with so many different experiences. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with a few different clients and to get to know them better. I’ve also had the chance to participate in the loan process in its entirety. One of the clients I got to meet with was approved for a loan, and this was a first for me since I am usually not meeting with this many clients. My prior role in JIFFI has been to take the initial client phone call and to set them up with a client pair, so I don’t always get to meet with them. The internship has allowed me to be on the other side of the process and to meet with more of these clients. It’s also given me more insight into the loan process since I don’t have to reach out to various people for approvals. Instead, I have an expanded role where I am responsible for making the approvals.
In addition to meeting with clients, I’ve gotten to learn about and use different tools such as Salesforce, and completed numerous operational tasks. In doing so, I identified opportunities for us to do some things better, and this was exciting! For example, I’ve been working on improving our process book so that it’s easier to look at the information in the future. I’ve also been putting together a directory with some community partners and descriptions of what they do so that we can refer our clients to some of these organizations. One of the most significant projects I have been working on involves cleaning up data and creating reports to gain more insight into our client profiles and understand what our best clients are like. This analysis should help us better understand when a client may be at risk for defaulting so that we can better manage it and help us see what an ideal client looks like so we can extend more loans to people.
I’m definitely looking forward to what the next week and a half has in store for me! I am excited to make more progress on the customer profiles, and I am planning on analyzing how people hear about JIFFI. This will help us determine how we can better target our communications.
-Selena Torres
