Are you using personas to help your organization better understand your customers?
I’ve written several posts – and shared one guest post – about the importance and the purpose of personas as part of your overall customer experience management strategy.
Personas are characters or characterizations you create to represent the various types of customers that (might) buy from you or that use your products or services. These personas are built based on conversations or interviews with customers and prospects. The interviews allow you to learn more about the customer: his needs, goals, behaviors, demographics, motivations, etc. Importantly, you are trying to understand what jobs they are trying to do. Each persona is described in detail based on the unique characteristics that comprise it.
Personas are actionable; once you understand who your customers are, you are better able to create and target messaging, design products and services, and deliver a more-relevant and personalized experience.
There are a couple of interesting observations I’ve made about personas in the last few years:
- Many CX professionals don’t know that they should be starting customer understanding and CX design with personas.
- Not every company has developed personas.
- For those who have, they are usually developed, owned, and used by one group.
- Personas are created based on the buyer funnel or for the sole purpose of marketing and selling products and services.
So, I’m really curious to find out who develops, deploys, and maintains personas within your organization. Is it the marketing department, the group that heads up customer experience initiatives, individual departments on an as-needed/case-by-case basis, or someone else? Or have personas even been developed within your company?
Please take a moment to answer the poll below. I’m looking forward to getting a better understanding of where these typically reside.
Thanks for taking the time to read and to respond to the poll!
If you don’t talk to your customers, how will you know how to talk to your customers? -Will Evans
Vote made.
I struggle a little with customer personas Annette.
Is it as simple as trying to put yourself in your customer's shoes?
James
Thanks, James. I think that's only part of it.
I voted Marketing although the process of creating personas should involve as many perspectives as possible. The reason I chose marketing was because at the end of the day sales are usually the driving force and if can't connect your marketing content to answer persona questions you're sunk.
Thanks for your vote and for your thoughts on the topic!