Blog post written by Jennifer Swartz
“Congratulations on your placement in the Consulting Abroad Program to Vietnam!” I still remember the feeling of pure joy and excitement upon reading the email that would dictate that the next six months of my life. I would be going to Vietnam, a country that I had long been vying to visit. However, the journey to get there was just beginning.
Shortly after receiving our CAP placements, I was put on the Cinestar team with three other amazing classmates. Our task was to work together to identify how we could assist Cinestar, a local Vietnamese movie theater, with expanding their market share in Vietnam. Our first line of business was to establish team norms – everything from expectations to communication to division of labor. This proved to be exponentially helpful and allowed us to operate efficiently and effectively throughout the semester. Our next task was to establish norms with our client.
There were many factors to take into consideration when approaching our client. While our contact does speak English, there is definitely a language barrier. On top of that, they are from a completely different culture and time zone. Given all of this, we wanted to utilize technology to the best of our ability to ensure that all parties were on the same page throughout our project.
Because of the time zone difference (originally 12 hours, but eventually 11 hours with daylight savings), we opted to have a limited number of phone calls via Skype. Any phone calls we did have were to fully talk through the project, such as when we first were trying to understand the issue at hand, and when we wanted to review our project’s final recommendations. We would follow up all phone calls with a comprehensive recap email. This included a brief summary of what was discussed, as well as next steps and any upcoming deadlines.
Our main form of communication thus became emails. To avoid any gaps in communication, we established an email schedule where we would send a project update email every other week. This reassured our client that we were diligently working on our project and provided our team with some structure to go about our project. It also paved the way for an easy platform to ask questions and get further clarification for all parties.
One way in which technology was not as beneficial as we would have liked was in our research. Because of the government restrictions in Vietnam, there was a lack of information about the Vietnamese movie industry on traditional search engines. However, we were and still are working closely with our client to determine the best ways to find pertinent pieces of information we need to provide substantial recommendations.
Overall, technology has been the crux of getting us through our CAP experience. It has provided a way to develop a solid relationship with our client, as well as allowed us to maintain that initial feeling of pure joy and excitement.
