Personas do help with getting more customer-centric

Introduction

Personas are a tool that many organisations use in order to get more customer-centric. This article will introduce you to personas and explain how they are used in customer experience, marketing and product development. The value of personas will be explored, as well as what could go wrong with using this technique. Then we'll look at some examples of companies that have used them successfully and why they find them valuable. No matter how hard you try or how good your intentions are, creating 'real-life customers' is still an imperfect science!

Introduction to personas

Personas are fictional characters that represent your target audience. They’re often used as a way to help you understand your customers better and make better decisions. Personas can be based on real people or they can be made up, with the goal being to get as much information about each persona as possible.

When building personas, there are three main questions you want to ask yourself:

●???Who is my target audience?

●???What do they need?

●???How do they act/think/feel?

How personas are used in customer experience, marketing and product development

Personas are a type of customer avatar that help you to focus on the right customers and build products for them. The concept of personas came from Steve Blank, who originally developed the concept with an eye toward building software that targeted a particular group of users.

Personas are based on data, but they aren't just dry numbers. Rather than being created by some marketing department or product team, personas can be built by interviewing people in your target audience and identifying patterns among them (e.g., "Jane Doe" is 34 years old, works at a small company as an accountant). This gives you a much better idea of who your customers really are than if you simply relied on statistics or other impersonal information about them.

A good persona will tell you what problems they have today so that when you're designing something new (like an onboarding flow), it solves those problems instead of creating new ones for them later down the line!

The value of personas

Personas are one of the most effective ways to get more customer-centric, and they can help you make better decisions.

They also have value outside of getting more customer-centric. Personas can help departments that don't talk much, or even help us look at the big picture (without getting lost in it). The bigger reason why people create personas is so that we can get our heads around why we're doing something—to be able to say, "this is for our customers," or "this is about solving a problem."

What could go wrong with personas?

But what's to stop personas from becoming too prescriptive? What if they turn into detailed, functional descriptions of ideal users that are so far removed from reality that they're more likely to confuse than illuminate? In the same way, how do you avoid creating general personas that don't give you much guidance in prioritizing features and functionality?

Personas can also be too specific. If your persona is exactly like someone who already exists in your target audience — "John Doe," who lives next door with his wife and two kids — then it isn't likely to help you understand how best to reach out and engage with people who aren't quite as similar. And then there's the opposite problem: Personas that are so abstract or fictionalized that they become meaningless (to say nothing of annoying).

If any one of these problems occurs with your personas, then it might be time for another approach.

Personas can help you get more customer-centric and make better decisions.

Personas can help you get more customer-centric and make better decisions.

Personas are just one tool in the toolbox of determining what your customers want and how they behave. But when used correctly, they can dramatically increase the quality of your decisions and speed up the process of getting them out into the world.

What do personas do?

Personas can help guide the design process by giving designers person-specific goals for their work—for example, if someone's persona prefers clean data visualization over interactive charts, then this information can inform decisions about how best to present data in an interface.

Personas help you create better customer experiences by providing a way for the team to visualize aspects of end-user behaviour and make them tangible during the design process. Personas also allow teams to describe scenarios from multiple perspectives (such as "Jill" versus "John," or "the customer who wants X feature" versus "the customer who doesn't want Y feature"), which helps ensure that everyone has all their bases covered when creating user interfaces or other products that interact with customers directly through software systems such as websites or apps.

Using personas in designing a better customer experience can help companies be more customer-centric

Personas are a great way to get everyone on the same page.

They help teams collaborate with each other, as well as with other departments and companies. They also make it easier for people to work together, which can lead to better collaboration between individuals as well.

Inevitably, team members will have questions about the project. With a project management system in place, these questions can be quickly answered and everyone on the team will have access to that information.

They can help departments that don't talk much.

Personas help teams that don't talk to each other. It's common for companies to have distinct departments that are working on different projects and have little interaction with one another. This can lead to a lack of understanding of the customers in one area, which makes it hard for others to understand their needs and wants. Personas give you a shared language and understanding across teams so everyone is on the same page when it comes to who they're building or selling products or services to.

They can help us make decisions faster, and still more customer-centric.

Personas are a powerful tool for decision-making, but they can also help us make more customer-centric decisions.

One of the reasons personas can help with getting more customer-centric is that they help us make faster decisions. There are many questions that we have to answer when creating products or services, and sometimes there isn’t enough time or resources to do this in the traditional way (i.e., find data). In these situations, personas can be used as a shortcut for making decisions even though there might not be enough information available about customers' needs and expectations. They give us an idea of what kind of people will use our product or service and how they like it to work so we can better understand what works and what doesn't work from their point of view before going through all the trouble of collecting data from them directly (which takes time).

Personas also help with making more customer-centric decisions because when there's uncertainty about which direction to go in terms of improving your product/service or developing something new—such as whether you should add another feature or fix an existing feature—personas provide some guidance by helping you ask yourself questions like "What would my persona want?"

They help with the big why of our work.

We’re all busy, and sometimes it can be hard to keep sight of the bigger picture. That’s why personas are so useful: they help you stay focused on what matters most for your product or service.

This is especially true if you have internal stakeholders who are keen to see tangible results from their work (and rightfully so). Personas enable you to demonstrate that your efforts are having an impact on your users, which helps make people feel good about the work they’re doing—and want to do more of it!

Personas can help you figure out what to test in your customer experience strategy.

Personas can help you figure out what to test in your customer experience strategy.

Personas are a great way to get inside a customer’s head and understand their needs, motivations, and pain points. When you know what your customers want, it makes it much easier to make decisions that will benefit them and delight them. This can be especially helpful when deciding which new features or services should be prioritized for development.

Personas also allow us to look at the big picture by providing a holistic understanding of our target customers' needs and behaviours across all channels—online, in-store, over the phone—and across different touchpoints within those channels (e-commerce checkout flow; online checkout flow; online shopping cart abandonment page).

Persona creation will always be an imperfect science, but they are a powerful tool if used right!

Personas are a good way to get more customer-centric. They help us make better decisions, design better customer experiences and get more cross-functional buy-in.

Personas will always be an imperfect science (if they were perfect, they would be called “customers”), but they can be powerful tools if used right!

Conclusion

I think that personas can be a great tool to get more customer-centric, but only if we keep things simple and focus on the big picture. The key is to not get lost in details or overthink things. The point is to help ourselves and others make better decisions by looking at the big picture and getting out of our own heads for a moment!