Customers have different needs, different expectations and respond differently to identical experiences.
That is why it is vital to define what types of customer are in scope before embarking on Journey Mapping, customer research or Service Design.
You can download our free Persona template here.
Personas are different, but linked to Segments and Personalisation. Unlike segments and personalisation, Personas are not defined by hard metrics like age and purchase recency but by customer’s needs and expectations.
They are detailed descriptions of fictitious customers who are typical of real customers, these descriptions should be informed by research, staff experience and other insights. The purpose of Personas is to bring different types of customers to life so your staff can more easily empathise and understand them and design experiences and content that better meet their needs.
A company can have different Personas for different projects, for example when thinking about lead generation and sales, one set of Personas may be relevant. However when talking about the customer service or complaints part of the journey a different set of Personas is likely to emerge.
We can help Clients quickly develop personas for a project. We start with existing web analytics, segmentation, research and data analysis. We distil this data and work with staff who span the customer journey or service in question and use their experience to add depth to the personas.
A Persona description brings this fictitious customer to life by giving them a name, describing their job and family life. It also goes into their relationship with the organisation, channel preference and so on. Critically it defines what they want from the journey in question and what their fears are likely to be.
You can download our free Persona template here.
Typically, we will use these personas to help us recruit the right type of customer for qualitative research and use the findings from this research to validate and enhance our Personas.
By defining the key needs of different Personas we are able to produce a series of sketches and a 2 by 2 grid like this one below.