Customer Journey Consultancy helped BiGDUG develop personas and customer journey maps of their key customer groups.
BiGDUG is a leading ecommerce provider selling equipment to customers ranging from major corporates to consumers and hobbyists. Following a change of ownership the company wanted to refocus its efforts to further improve the customer experience.
A key objective for BiGDUG was to develop a better understanding of what different types of customer want. They asked CJC to help them tailor their content and service to improve the satisfaction, sales and lifetime value of their major customer groups.
What are Personas
Rather than think in terms of segments (order value, job title and so on), we helped staff to think about personas. Personas define people by their behaviours and needs and provide a deeper understanding of what makes people tick.
Combining Personas and Customer Journey Maps allows you to think deeply about the end-to-end experiences of different types of customer. It helps you decide who you can compete most vigorously for and how to personalise your offering and experiences to meet their distinct needs.
What we did
We developed and delivered a change programme that included four key steps:
- To work with staff to understand and group customers by different needs (Personas)
- We then developed a screener and recruited customers from each Personas and conducted qualitative research where we explored their needs and experiences of dealing with BiGDUG in more detail
- Using the research insights we worked with a cross-functional team to develop ‘As Is’ and ‘To Be’ customer journey maps for each persona.
- We helped them prioritise the changes needed to deliver the most important aspects to the ‘To Be’ journey so they could present their recommendations to the Senior Leadership Team.
Key Learnings
Staff were taken through a steep learning curve and were surprised to discover that many of their assumptions about customers were incorrect.
For example it was widely held that purchase decisions in this category were purely rational and transactional. The team were completely taken aback by the importance of emotions, pride and aesthetics for some Personas.
Another surprise was the strong desire by customers to find a supplier they could trust and build a long-term relationship with. For all Personas this was driven by the high effort and risk of starting from scratch with a new, unknown supplier.
The company also learnt about major opportunities to improve the way they were managing long-term relationships with Key Accounts.
