Do You Really Know Who Your Customers Are?

How do you define your customer in L&D? In order to be a strategic partner, we need to think about who our customer is, outside of the obvious (learners) and determine how we will meet their needs and expectations.?

In marketing speak, customer segmentation is defined as the practice of dividing a customer base into groups of individuals that have similar characteristics relevant to marketing, such as age, gender, interests and spending habits. This means that when creating learning, or comms campaigns to reach customers, the approach may be different, depending on the audience.?

So who are our customers and how do we get to know them? I can come up with some, though I’m sure there are more. Learners, line managers, sr. leaders, SMEs, external partners or external customers, key stakeholders such as IT, HR, Procurement. Many of these groups actually interact with our product (our curriculum), however, many of these groups are considered our customers because they interact with our learning in some way. Therefore, I’m calling them our customers.

And in order to properly understand and segment our customers it’s important to take the time to know your customers, their environment, learning habits and preferences, as well as their expectations of learning in order to best understand how you can meet their needs.

I’ve had a lot of experience with design thinking and I love the concept of persona mapping and journey mapping when it comes to understanding your user, or customer as I’m calling in this newsletter.

Persona mapping is the process of creating and organizing fictional representations of target users or customers to better understand their needs, goals, behaviors, and preferences. It’s an opportunity to deeply understand your customer from multiple perspectives of who they are…as well as who they are not. It’s important to create a persona from the understanding of what drives them, what challenges they face and how to best reach them. We can even examine the opposite ends of the spectrum when describing our personas, ex- sr. leader vs. frontline employee, both considered customers, giving you an opportunity to view stakeholders from different perspectives even somewhere in between. Let’s call one persona, Joe. He is a frontline employee who works on a manufacturing floor, with limited opportunity for learning while working, due to his work schedule. He does not have easy access to technology throughout the day, his shift is fixed, and his job remains consistent day after day. On the other end of this spectrum is Lourdes, who is a sr. leader within the same organization. She mostly spends her days in meetings with others, sitting in front of her desk and her day to day varies based on how she plans her days.?

Their learning experiences are very different. Their need to learn may not be different, what they need to learn and, how they learn during a workday will be different.?

Journey mapping enables you to explore the entire experience of your customer, from beginning, to the middle, to the end. We observe the highs and the lows, the bright spots and the challenges, and in learning, this is where we find our sweet spot, our opportunity to create value to our customer, where they need to grow. Journey maps provide us with highlighted points in time that matter to our customers.

Taking the time to understand all of our customers, rather than only meeting the needs of some customers, may take longer however, it's the key to making your learning stick. Talking to customers, observing them, asking them questions all go a long way to recruit those who may not be taking advantage of what you have to offer, simply because it doesn’t fit their needs or they just can’t do it.

Get to know your customer, be customer centric, your customers will thank you.