Katie's Customer Survey Internship with Flagship Housing Association

My time at Flagship Housing Association overall was a positive experience; especially after a long and frustrating search after graduating from university for a chance to prove myself in. This position was a perfect match to me as it not only gave me the great amount of personal responsibility and control over my work, but allowed me to develop within the role to my own pace. Basically in my internship I was responsible for finding out the levels of digital exclusion (specifically internet use) among Flagship’s customers through research. This was done through two methods, a survey and a focus group to gain a balance between raw data and the thoughts and feelings of customers’ experiences with digital technologies. However the focus groups did not fare as well as the survey as very few customers turned up in the end; a total of 3! Yet my activities, including the focus group, regarding the analysis were spread out among the three months that I was there.

January

January was one of my most hard working but least busy months with Flagship. It was hard because I had to find more work to do which involved me being proactive within my office to a great degree. Examples could be asking my fellow colleagues if they had spare admin work (often filing backlog) but most of my time was occupied with research on affordability and demand project on behalf of my line manager at the time. My lack of focus on the main project however was a result of not having any data to analyse and having most of the co-ordination in setting up the survey and focus group with more relevant departments after I have done my part in writing up the survey, focus group questions and chosen the relevant locations for the groups to be held. January was mostly a waiting game until the surveys started coming back in February and conducting the first focus group at the end of the month which only had two participants.

February

This month was quite busy, not that I was running around to different offices, I found that I didn’t need to travel all that much in my three months while I was there. I was busy doing the main part of my project which was entering the data from the flood of surveys that came through. Or maybe it just seemed busy as I was finally honing onto a project of my own after waiting for survey to be mailed. In the end more than 2000 surveys came back from customers provided a great basis for analysis and progress for research as well. However the final focus group was even worse than the first only one turned up! However I was not discouraged as they give us something worthwhile for the final report, even if it wasn’t for an urban / rural comparison, it just supported some of the correlations found in the survey data.

March

March. The final month. The hectic month. Month of nerves but of Triumph. This was the month that pulled all of my previous hard work to shame. Not only did I use previous research skills in the analysis of the survey data but I had to learn new tricks with Excel in order to correctly display the data in a chart. Also my writing skills were also tested as I had to exercise restraint in explaining what the results showed rather than attempt to write why some people had access to the internet or not. In the end the report came out beautifully concise and professional! Yet that was not the end of my internship there. I expressed that I wanted to do a presentation at the end of the internship to give a summary of my report to key members of staff whom would benefit best from it. It namely consisted of the entire marketing team some which helped coordinate the focus groups, IT staff members and the CEO who shook my hand after the presentation; so I think it went well!

My time at Flagship was an overall positive experience. I gained more confidence in my own abilities and how to conduct myself in a professional environment. Skill wise I found that I picked up at university, like my focused work ethic, organisational skills, and communication skills, all proved useful in the end. However I did learn the ability to ask for help in finding information, how to network and greater personal initiative. Even though I know the job market is not much better than when I started this internship I know I will be better capable for any future challenges.