A persona is a visualization of a representation of your customer. Personas can be detailed or high-level, based on your goals and usage of them. A persona helps humanize the customer.
We develop personas for specific activities around customer experience management. They are extremely useful when it comes to:
- Customer journey mapping.
- Customer service blueprinting.
- Designing customer feedback strategies.
- Prioritizing improvements along the customer journey.
- Aligning the right customer success manager or customer service representative with the right customer.
The foundations of customer personas
In business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations, personas are typically about the main shopper or buyer of the product. In business-to-business (B2B) organizations, personas often focus on the professional role the customer has within the client organization, including their likely title and department.
Personas are often based on research, including customer segmentation and market research data. The best personas include a mix of data types to provide a holistic view of the customer you are serving.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way businesses understand and interact with their customers. By leveraging AI, businesses can develop better customer personas, resulting in more personalized customer journeys.
Machine learning algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data, such as purchase history, browsing behavior and social media interactions to reveal patterns and insights that may have been missed using traditional analysis methods.
Natural language processing (NLP) can analyze text data to identify and understand customer personality traits, values and needs. NLP can analyze unstructured data, such as customer reviews and social media posts, to uncover sentiment, opinions and preferences.
Sentiment analysis can provide valuable insights into how customers feel about a brand, product or service. By incorporating these insights into customer personas, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and develop more effective customer journeys.
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Three steps to creating a customer persona
Before jumping into the tools and technology, leaders must have a real strategy and plan around developing and using their customer personas.
There are three basic steps to creating a customer persona:
- Identify the project goal and how these personas will be used. What is most important to know? For example, if you are embarking on a customer journey mapping project with a specific scope, like signing up for a mobile app, then you will want to know about the customers who use, or are likely to use, that mobile app.
- Tap into the research available to you. This could include demographic information, customer feedback, or information from customer-facing teams like customer success. Define and consider the specific points of interaction between each customer persona and your brand. This is where you might outline use cases, customer roles (like buyer versus end-user in B2B), and where they interact along the customer journey.
- Use a common template to create all your personas. This will help limit the urge to include too much nuance and help your teams refer to personas consistently.
These templates might include similar features like:
- Photo or image, along with a name or initials, as well as life information like family or education details.
- Their decision-making process, like what media or content they consume, as well as what influences them.
- Their challenges and celebrations, specifically how they define wins and losses.
- Their emotional and attitudinal relationship to your industry.
- Quotes that help personify their real-life experiences.
- Their goals with your brand.
Do not forget to plan for socializing and communicating to others in your organization. Personas can be attached to tools like customer journey maps as they are shared, to remind everyone who the customer actually is on this journey!
While these steps seem easy enough, there are some common challenges for anyone designing and developing customer personas.
Challenge #1 - What information is most important?
It is easy to feel like there is more to know about our customers, so we should keep researching and learning to include as much information as possible.
Remember these personas are simple representations of complex human beings. They will never truly encapsulate the way humans interact, make decisions or feel emotions. No matter how much information we collect, these will be helpful but imperfect guides to understanding our individual customers.
Resist the temptation to delay getting a persona because the research itself is so time-consuming. Waiting for the next report, the next survey or the next set of interviews might be the right thing to do when you really do not have enough information. But often it is a form of “analysis paralysis” and delays getting a persona to use.
Like other tools, personas can be changed and updated as you learn more about the marketplace, your customers, or your organization.
With the opportunities AI gives us, you can update and revise quickly. After all, your customers will have shifting expectations and your organization will release updated products.
Perfect is the enemy of done and done is not final forever. Do not get hung up on the many ways to define a person. Focus on what you need to achieve your goals, on behalf of the customer you are serving.
Slow Down: Do not shortchange Step # 1 - Define your goals. What tools will help you achieve your CX outcomes in the best ways? If your goal is to be more customer-centric during the onboarding process, then it helps to consider what actions you will take to achieve that.
Determine what others in your organization need to know to really connect with the person who is your customer. Tap into what is most necessary for leaders in your organization to understand about how the customer is really feeling and interacting with your brand.
Challenge #2 - Demographics in today’s world
This is a challenge many organizations are grappling with today: what do we do about gender identity, or gendering personas in general? Are there details in the persona that are influencing how our teams think about customers in terms of race, culture, or even region that might lead to being less inclusive than we should be?
It is common for teams to assume they know their customers and include details like age and race without thinking much about it. The challenge is how these personas can actively exclude future customers without intending to.
If your buyer today is a corporate leader who is white, male and 60 years old, that does not mean your buyer of tomorrow will be. The world is (thankfully) changing to become more inclusive, and there are real efforts around diversity in hiring. Personas should zero in on what is important to customers around how and why they need your product or interact with your brand.
This also is important to consider when serving customers in various regions. Behaviors and attitudes are different from place to place, culture to culture. Be aware of respecting cultural awareness in ways that are inclusive. Bring in diverse team members and others who can help navigate these cultural nuances.
Consider: Avoid gender roles and use generic initials instead of names to avoid Euro-centric or gender-specific identities. To do this, use initials like C.J. and refer to pronouns as “they”. Watch for gender-specific wording. Use “parent” instead of “Mom” for example.
Consider ways to be inclusive around accessibility, as well. Your personas ideally include customers with different abilities to help leaders understand and design experiences for all.
Challenge #3 - The Fantasy Customer
I have seen a lot of personas that paint a picture of the absolute perfect customer. They include quotes that express undying loyalty to the brand, and attitudes like “picky about brands but loves ACME!”
It is easy to fall in love with the fantasy of the ideal customer. But that will not help you design better experiences for the real-life customers you do have.
Watch out for leaders who want to “correct” the research or feedback you have found. They are well-intentioned but misguided. They often assert that the customers they talk to regularly are dedicated and loyal. While that might be true for a few customers, it is not the case for most customers. Designing and delivering great experiences means making personas that serve many customers, not just our favorite ones.
Reality Check: It is important to review each persona with an eye toward your customer’s real life. That means including their everyday frustrations and real-life obstacles along the customer journey.
Some personas include two quotes that reflect the ideal and the disappointed experience a customer may have. It is a good reminder that their experience is based on what is actually delivered!
Keep It Simple: Refer to your goals and remember you can always add a persona later. The usefulness of personas should not be delayed to include every layer of an org chart for your business customer. Instead, start with who you know is your “main” customer and then build from there.
Personas are powerful because they help us translate data into humanity. Leaders need to connect to the emotional realities of customers and dashboards, and data alone simply cannot do that.
What CX questions do you have? Leave a voicemail for me to answer on my Experience Action Podcast!
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