Design Strategy: A Realistic Customer Model is Key
Constructing a data-driven customer model is one of the key components of the UX Strategy Workshop (https://bit.ly/3LrbN5L) I am teaching this year at selected host sites in Europe, Asia and the USA. I don't think it's possible to develop a compelling experience strategy without a deep understanding of your customers, because they are the ones who will have the experience for which you are creating the strategy.
Many companies collect so much data on customers that they have a hard time understanding it, distributing it to all of the people who need it, and acting on it. Just keeping track of the kinds of data that are collected can be a challenge in a large company. It pours in from all directions in an unending stream. Analytics packages can track hundreds or even thousands of variables, which can be manipulated and analyzed in myriad ways. Video cameras in stores capture millions of data points per minute. Every swiped card generates the transfer of personal financial viability data. Mobile devices specific to individuals convey location and other kinds of customer history. Sensors and biometric devices capture every heartbeat.
While you have all kinds of great sources of data to understand your customers, it's not useful to the vast majority of your team and stakeholders in raw form, even if your research repository is intuitively organized. That's why it's critical to create a model that will help everyone understand who your customers are, what they do, and why they behave the way they do. Your customer model should accept a set of curated data streams, and process those inputs in a way that gives you insights that you can act on. These insights lead to a compelling strategy, which will have more impact if it's based on a simplified customer model that your audience can drill into, all the way back to primary data.
The customer model that many experience design leaders and teams use to understand customers is the persona. However, personas are only useful for decision-making and your experience strategy if they are based on solid customer data, and have been quantified so that you know their actual relative impact. Another customer behavior model frequently used by experience design teams are experience maps, or customer journey maps.
Models are a simplified representation of a complex entity or process that makes it easier to understand. Your team can use a customer model to capture, interpret, and communicate your understanding of your key customers. Since the customer model is foundational to the experience design strategy you create, it should be posted in very visible areas that many different stakeholders pass by each day. This not only helps you create the awareness that you deeply understand your customers, but it also gives other groups that may have pieces of the puzzle to step forward and make your model smarter. At first they may do this in a confrontational way, but extending a collaborative olive branch and incorporating their truths into the model will only make it better, and will also create broader support for the strategy you are promoting.
The UX Strategy Workshop I will be teaching (https://bit.ly/3LrbN5L), and the UX STRAT conferences in Europe, Asia and the USA, will describe many more methods to develop a strong strategic point of view, gather evidence to support and refine your strategy, and build influence to ensure that your strategy will survive the production process to see the light of day.