CREATING YOUR CUSTOMER PERSONA

Creating customer personas can help provides valuable insight and understanding of how your customers think and act and can help you align your brand with your customers’ goals.

The Tool

The Customer Persona tool is designed to help you research and define your ideal customer types. Developing customer personas involves distinguishing the motivations, needs and wants of a range of potential customers – and should provide a central reference point for teams making changes to their customer propositions or improvements to the way they deliver their services.

Why use it?

The process of creating these personas provides really valuable insight and a deep understanding of how your customers think and act. This will bring your target audience to life and make it much easier for you and your staff to make decisions on where and how to make improvements.

Creating customer personas allows everyone in your organisation to keep on the same page and creates a common language around the customer. When you’ve defined your customer persona and given them a name – then everyone can refer to them and know exactly who is being talked about.

How to use it

Get a mix of the right people together in a room (ensure that between them they know about all key aspects of your business). It is important to include your sales and front-line teams in your discussions, as they will have the best first-hand experience of your customers and know what motivates them to engage with your company and what their ‘pain points’ are.

A session might run along these lines:

Identify your key market segments and the most valuable customers within them. You can look through your customer database to focus in on customers that are good for your business and with whom you like to do business. In other words, those that are a good fit.

Ideally, you should identify a handful (1-3) of customer types who fit with your business.

Now divide up the chosen customer types between the group members and take 15 minutes to each fill in the customer persona template.

Try to give your persona a memorable name, and where possible, provide real-life examples and stories to bring your persona to life.

Next, bring everyone back together to present and discuss their personas. Pay particular attention to the similarities and differences in the group's work.

Finally, combine the most memorable and pertinent aspects of each of the personas - so that you have 1 persona for each customer type.

Use your personas to develop your customer strategies and plans. For a quick-fix you can use them to review what you’re doing at the moment to see if there are any obvious areas where you are not meeting the needs or speaking the language of your potential customers.

You customer personas should be living documents. Add more detail and colour as you gain deeper insights about your customer and their needs. Add more personas if it becomes clear that a persona is too generic, and that it needs to be spilt down to provide more focused profiles.