The importance of Personas in Customer Experience

Some people believe that you can easily capture a portion of the market with a disruptive product or service. On the other hand, others believe that even the most sophisticated things are unlikely to be purchased, because you may miss the target audience’s desires or perhaps detract from their experience.

Product orientation vs customer orientation

In my belief, firms adopt a product-focused approach when they develop products and services with the goal of earning a lucky strike. They also think that people don’t realize what they desire until they see it, and they think that the power of persuasion is strong.

But there is another approach where everything is geared towards meeting the needs, goals, frustrations, and problems of customers rather than products or services. Customer research is a significant undertaking. It requires time and effort. However, you gain true loyalty rather than dependence, and you reap the benefits in the long term.

It’s hard to say for sure whether Microsoft‘s product-centric approach or IBM‘s customer experience (CX) approach is better. IBM, which relies on customer experience (CX), is close behind, despite being product-centric.

Despite the fact that 70% of B2B customers don’t make it past the sales phase, customer-centricity is the way to go if you don’t want to lose potential customers early on and are interested in winning their hearts and minds.

Making customers the heart of the company

It’s not simple to become a customer-centric company. You must first understand and know your customers. Persona definition can assist you with that.

A persona is an imaginary character that represents a group of your clients. You can picture any number of people behind a single persona, and you can target as many personas as you like. If your audience is diverse, you can picture one, two, or even more personas.

Why Personas?

A persona can provide you with a lot of benefits aside from letting you experience what it’s like to be one of your customers:

• Segmentation: Rather than appealing to every type of person, you turn a large audience into a few persona profiles that are realistic, relatable, and easily managed.
• Visualization: Instead of reading through a large amount of customer research data, you can glance through a brief profile that covers all the necessary elements to communicate with stakeholders.
• Potential: It’s always possible to locate issues and opportunities in your customer experience (CX) by building a customer journey map.

Building a Persona in Five Steps

It’s a time-consuming process, but it pays off big time with lots of insights. Here are five steps to follow.

Step 1: Do research

Quality research is the most crucial element in building personas. Make sure to collect data, talk with customer-facing employees, run surveys and polls, and examine customer feedback. The more information you have at your disposal, the higher your chances of success will be.

Step 2: Identify patterns

Look for patterns in the data you’ve collected. Behavioral aspects are better than demographic information in revealing customers’ buying habits.

If you notice that a specific group of individuals uses tablets to shop online, visits your website at the homepage, have previously used a comparable item, and have a few other behavioral similarities, you might identify a unique persona.

Step 3: Create a customer profile

You can create a digital persona using Google Sheets or a persona creation tool. Alternatively, you may create a persona on a whiteboard or on paper. Digital personas are more convenient because they allow for quick changes and are easier for team members to access.

Step 4: Add details to your persona profile

Your persona should be given a name and a photo, if you can. Try to give them a personality type, as well. Even if personas are made-up characters, real people are behind them.

Step 5: Enter the market

Once you have created your personas, you can reap the rewards. Is there a way to enter the market with confidence by using personas?

Having personas will make it easier for you to develop and revise products or services. Having personas will save you a lot of time and effort, since you will not have to guess as much as you used to.

Creating personas can help you gain a sizeable share of the market and connect with consumers in the following ways:

• Development strategy: By identifying your personas’ niches, you can target them without spreading your resources.
• Product range: Rather than creating one product that appeals to all of your customers, you may increase sales by developing versions specific to different personas.
• Pricing: By knowing your personas’ budgets, you can determine what profit margin will not empty their wallets.
• Positioning: By recognizing the personas’ pains and goals, you can address their pain points with your product or service.
• Messaging: When you use the same vocabulary as your personas, you speak the same language as they do, which allows you to have a better interaction than your competitors.
• Promotion: You can test a marketing strategy on a certain number of customers represented by a persona; if it succeeds, you will be confident that other people under that persona’s umbrella will respond positively as well
• Channels: Being aware of the types of channels your personas prefer lets you approach customers in the locations they expect you to appear.
• Selling:  When you comprehend the demands of your target market and the problems they encounter as they purchase and utilize your product or service, you will be able to sell more.

How do Personas Enhance the Entire Customer Experience (CX)?

Building personas has a positive impact on the overall customer experience, whether you are launching a product or have already launched it. Here’s why:

– Instead of focusing on creating a product that would beat their competition, you focus on finding the best solution for your customers, improving the product, and enhancing the customer experience at the same time.

– When customers see that your company values their opinion, they are more likely to give honest feedback and contribute valuable ideas, improving the final product for themselves. Furthermore, they become loyal to the brand, spreading the word about your company to family, friends, and random individuals.

– By being aware of your customers’ pains, goals and expectations, you can craft helpful and shareable content.

– Staff have common understanding of your customers. They feel empathy for them and understand how to engage with them.