Customer personas and customer segments are two terms that leaders often use in a briefing about customer experience. On the surface, both may seem similar, but they are different deep down.
Here, we mainly emphasize customer persona because building a customer persona backed by data-driven insights can contribute significantly to customer experience initiatives and decision-making.
However, creating customer segments can be more seamless than building customer persona as executives can segment customers with solid parameters, age, geography, order size, etc., straightaway. When it comes to customer persona, business leaders need to think about a way to categorize customers based on their emotions, unique needs, or behavior. It's tricky, right? Leaders would be concerned about the precision and proper methods in this categorization.
Here, data-driven insights are the life-savers of leaders.
Creating personas without incorporating a data-driven approach may result in personas that serve as nothing more than a creative writing exercise, lacking practical use for CX improvement. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods and leveraging VoC data is crucial to ensure effective personas. This will provide organizations with new and valuable insights about their customers that were not previously known, ultimately leading to enhanced decision-making processes and improved CX outcomes.
Well-built personas have the potential to cater data insights to different departments instead of solely helping the customer experience team. Customer persona will be an excellent reference for sales, marketing, UX, and product teams to curate, alter, and refine their efforts to attract or satisfy customers with different needs and expectations. Hence, a customer persona is a resource that gives value to the entire organization.
5 Things to Consider While Building Customer Personas Using Data-Driven Insights
As mentioned, data-driven customer insights can be an excellent resource for the organization to make strategic decisions. But how do you start building a persona?
Check these 5 essential factors:
1. Build Customer Personas Based on Customers' Needs and Emotions
Personas should be developed to thoroughly evaluate how customers are segmented. This evaluation should consider quantifiable attributes such as purchase frequency, order size, geography, industry classification, and product type. These segments help identify sets of customers that provide the most current or potential value to the business. By understanding the needs of these segments, companies can create personas that accurately represent their target customers and guide decision-making processes.
Collecting first-party data through multiple sources such as customer surveys, social media listening, web and mobile analytics, and search data is essential to developing accurate personas. These sources provide valuable insights into customers' psychographic, behavioral, technographic, and ethnographic characteristics and demographics. By combining relevant data, companies can comprehensively understand their customers and build personas that drive meaningful engagement and understanding.
Starting with archetypes representing real customers can also enhance the organization's usability and relevance of personas. For example, one archetype of an airline company is business people who travel frequently. Identifying these archetypes helps stakeholders connect with the personas on a deeper level. They should be based on identifiable groups of customers with similar needs, enabling companies to gather specific insights such as channel usage, content preferences, and satisfaction levels. By using archetypes as a foundation, companies can create actionable personas tailored to different areas of their organization.
Check an example of a customer persona prepared for a project management tool provider:
(Image source: Hubspot)
2. Establish a Flexible Work Structure for Customer Personas
The main reason for making each persona flexible and in a dynamic work structure is that not a single set of personas can contain all relevant insights valuable for the entire organization. So, companies should aim to develop a persona framework that is adaptable, flexible, and relevant for different end-users. This means that while the archetype or general persona remains constant, the data and insights associated with it are continuously revised and updated to meet the specific requirements and objectives of different teams or departments within the organization.
By tailoring the personas and associated data to different areas, such as customer experience, content marketing, or mobile user experience (UX) development, organizations can better understand their target audience and better meet their needs. For example, the frequent business passenger persona designed for CX would focus on defining this audience's unique problems, goals, and expectations along their customer journey. On the other hand, the frequent business passenger persona designed for content marketing efforts would emphasize topics, content types, and channel preferences that resonate with this audience.
This dynamic framework for activating personas allows organizations to effectively utilize data and insights in a relevant and impactful way for various purposes. It ensures that different teams develop persona-driven strategies and initiatives that align with organizational objectives. Moreover, it fosters continuous improvement and adaptation based on customers' ever-changing needs and preferences. This framework allows organizations to create a unified understanding of their customers while maintaining the flexibility to tailor their approach and meet specific goals in different business areas.
3. Build Personas that are Insights-Rich
To deliver knowledgeable and relevant personas across different stakeholders in the organization, it is essential to consider the goals and purpose behind developing these personas. This will influence the data sources utilized, the level of detail included, and the visual style employed. The templates used for creating personas can differ significantly depending on the objectives. The primary aim is to gather as much relevant information as possible on the target audience to construct accurate and meaningful representations of their preferences, needs, and user behavior.
This might involve analyzing data from multiple sources, such as market research, customer surveys, website data analysis, and social media insights. The resulting personas should provide a detailed snapshot of the customers, allowing businesses to better understand their target market and curate their business strategy accordingly. The presentation of these personas should be visually appealing and accessible, ensuring that all key insights are communicated and understood.
4. Incorporate Internal Resources While Building Personas
When deciding on the level of detail for your personas, it is essential to consider your resources and capabilities in-house. While working with agencies can provide expertise and additional resources, many marketers have the skills and knowledge to develop personas internally. Budget, timeline, and internal capabilities should be considered when determining the persona development approach.
In-house analytics teams can often provide enough data to inform personas but may lack the time or expertise to conduct ethnographic research. However, it is vital to be aware of organizational biases that may arise when using in-house resources, making it essential to accurately collect and interpret objective data to represent your target audience. A practical solution is to consider adopting customer experience insights platforms or data analysis tools to make this process much more manageable.
The level of depth for personas can vary depending on the needs of your brand or team. For smaller brands or teams, starting with a more basic persona can help establish a baseline understanding of the most critical factors. However, regardless of the level of detail, personas must be data-driven and contextualized using real customer insights. The focus should be on creating personas that are fit for purpose and provide data-driven insight. It is essential to determine the level of detail necessary for your specific goals and ensure that the personas align with the desired outcome.
5. Emphasize the Importance of Personas Across Functions
The value of personas in an organization is often not fully realized or utilized unless there is active and ongoing management to promote their insights. This requires advocating for personas, educating employees on their importance, and extending their use across different organizational functions. Creating personas is not the only goal here; it's a step to achieve the ultimate business goal; hence, the personas must also be effectively implemented and integrated into various aspects of the business operations. This can be achieved by communicating the perks of personas to different functions, encouraging their application, and inviting active participation in improving them.
To maximize the value of personas, they should be easily accessible throughout the organization. This can be achieved by utilizing sharing mechanisms such as intranets, PDF libraries, or webinars. Employees should be able to find persona documentation easily and understand how to apply personas to their daily work. Investing in a customer journey platform can also help serve as a repository for personas, facilitating their creation, distribution, and refresh as needed. Clear points of contact and processes should be established for making recommendations and improving the personas while also maintaining governance processes to avoid the proliferation of too many variations that can dilute the impact of personas.
Lastly,
Personas should not be treated as a one-time project but should evolve and refresh over time. Customers and the needs of the business can change, requiring personas to be validated and updated periodically. Regularly refreshing personas ensure they remain relevant and reflect the most current information. It is essential to prioritize the ongoing management and maintenance of personas to continue extracting their maximum value for the organization.
Read more: The Circle of Excellence: Total Experience Drives Employee Motivation and Customer Delight