Making Personas Data-Driven and Actionable

Personas and customer journeys are a core tool for experience management professionals.? They provide a window into the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of customers as they engage with a company’s employees, its products, and it’s physical and digital channels.? Personas allow you to walk in your customers’ shoes and appreciate the emotions they feel at peak moments in the journey that are most meaningful and memorable for them.? Personas and journeys help to build a common vocabulary and shared understanding across stakeholders as they collaborate on ways to improve the experience. They help spark ideas for experience design as you focus on ways to better serve the needs of your personas.

But if all you use your personas and journeys for is upfront ideation, you are missing out on an opportunity to create more continuous insights and track the impact of your experience design investments.? Often, companies take a separate approach to personas from other more data-driven customer segmentation analytics.? This is a missed opportunity to be able to target your personas and to tailor the experience for them in real-time across the customer journey.? Being able to activate against your personas and track your insights against them provides a powerful way to generate insights and reinforce an ongoing build-measure-learn cycle.? It enables a stronger culture of experimentation.

You can also tap into advances in AI to mine insights from your unstructured data signals (calls, emails, social media, in-app and text messages, chat) to build insights and map customers to your personas based on your cumulative interactions with them.? Then you can use AI to optimize your content in ways that are more emotionally engaging for your personas along their customer journey.

At JourneySpark, we’re excited to team with the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) on an online course that focuses on how to make your personas and journeys more data-driven and actionable.?

The course is organized into five video modules, that are less than 1.5 hours combined.? You can find out more about the course on CXPA’s website at https://www.pathlms.com/cxpa/courses .?

Check out these short video clips, both less than one minute, that provide some more information about the course:

• Click here for a quick introduction to the course, recorded together with Greg Melia, CAE , CEO of the CXPA
• Click here to learn more about what makes this approach different than typical approaches to personas and journeys

If you’d like to learn more about the course, please come to one of the free open houses that JourneySpark is hosting together with CXPA, the first of which is on Thursday, November 21st. There’s no obligation to sign up for the course to attend one of the open houses, which will provide a forum to discuss the concepts in the course and how to get the most out of your participation. You can sign up for the open house on the CXPA site above.

When you take the course, you’ll also have an opportunity to download the companion workbook that provides some useful frameworks and exercises you can do to apply the concepts you’ll learn in each of the video modules. Please also don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.?

We’re excited to help you on your own journey to be more customer-driven and to make your personas and journeys more data-driven and actionable!