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Is it time to refresh your customer persona?

 
 
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Is it time to refresh your personas?

FOUR REASONS WHY IT MIGHT BE TIME TO
REFRESH YOUR CUSTOMER PERSONAS

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Voice of the Customer

Your original personas were not previously informed or built using the actual voice of the customer.

Your existing personas were built based upon who you think buys your product or service rather than informed by qualitative or quantitative research.

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Customer Evolution

You recognize that customer motivations, attitudes, and behaviors have evolved over time.

Your existing personas reflected who your initial customers were but have not evolved in alignment with your product or service offering.

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Omni-channel

Your personas were built to design your website without consideration of other channels.

Your existing personas were defined only within the context of a single channel (e.g., website), not in relationship to the entire customer journey.

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No Longer Referenced

Your personas are no longer being referenced; considered irrelevant or simply too outdated.

Stakeholders no longer refer to or reference your original persona when envisioning how to improve the overall customer experience.

To design unique and differentiated customer experiences you need to know who you are designing for. Customer personas help you define ‘for whom’ you are designing an experience.

Personas help you empathize with your targeted customer segments and build an understanding of what is at the core of their affinity and/or bond with your brand. They are foundational to building an understanding of the customer journey - typically unique to each persona.

However, over time your personas can become outdated, less relevant, and/or no longer referenced internally.

 

Defining New Customer Personas

key Considerations when refreshing your customer personas

Robust customer personas are focused on building an understanding of customer progress (or goals), motivational forces (promoting or blocking change), and the value associated to your product or service. When refreshing your customer personas, it's important to ensure you understand how these things differ across each persona:

 

Customer Progress (or Goals)

The ultimate goal the person is trying to achieve (customer progress).

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Consumers are always seeking to make progress in their lives. Typically to achieve something beyond the product or service itself.

Understanding this goal is critical to both establishing and maintaining relationship with customers.

Motivational Forces Promoting Change

The Push and Pull forces driving one to "hire" your product or service.

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The Push of a situation is what is propelling them to consider a new behavior while the Pull is what is aspirational about it.

Reference blog post below for more detailed description of Four Forces Model.

Motivational Forces Blocking a Change

Habits or Anxieties which act as barriers to making a change (switching).

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Habits are allegiance to existing behaviors while Anxieties are concerns regarding a new behavior.

Reference blog post below for more detailed description of Four Forces Model.

Brand to Consumer Elements of Value

Understanding the value customers associate with your product or service.

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Customer value can be functional, emotional and/or aspirational. Values can be pictured within the context of a hierarchy of needs.

Reference B2C Elements of Value Framework and blog post for more detailed description.

Read my blog post illustrating the four motivational forces at play (promoting or blocking change) while making a decision whether to “hire” Blue Apron’s meal delivery service. It identifies from a personal perspective how they influenced my own decision. You’ll see how this framework can be applied widely applied to other consumer purchase decisions.

 

Existing personas are outdated and no longer relevant

Does this sound like your company?

That’s us. Our existing customer personas were put together when we redesigned our website and don't reflect the wants and needs of our customers across channels.

Schedule a quick chat to learn more about How to refresh your customer personaS leveraging the Voice of the Customer

 
 

Customer Persona Sprint

RETHINKING YOUR CUSTOMER PERSONAS

To build an improved understanding of your personas you want to get at their underlying motivations and values. You want this to be directly informed by the Voice of the Customer (VOC). You want to build an understanding of “why” they hire your product or service. In addition, you want to discern the different functional, emotional, and aspirational values that form the bond between them and your brand.

We've had great success using Online Focus Groups as a cost effective way to capture the voice of the customer to inform the definition of more robust customer persona applying tailored listening strategies:

 

Pre-Research

→ Define what success will look like (desired outcomes)

→ Review existing personas and assess recency, research basis and relevancy

→ Define participant recruitment strategy (targeted personas)

→ Design screener to select desired participants

→ Design Activity Guide to support conversation with customers


Research

→ Invite and select desired participants

→ Launch Online Community (3 to 5 days)

→ Listen for customer goal, motivations, and motivational forces (push, pull, habits, anxieties)

→ Listen for B2C Elements of Value Themes

→ Listen for unmet customer needs (jobs-to-be-done)

→ Publish transcript from Online Community

Post-Research

→ Analyze and tag (code) customer conversations

→ Summarize core themes from Online Community

→ Determine whether an alternative segmentation approach is necessary

→ Revise existing customer personas

→ Review/update with all stakeholders

→ Publish new customer personas


SPRINT DURATION: 5 to 6 weeks

We’ve determined over the course of time that Bain & Companies B2C 30 Elements of Value Framework is a powerful framework to utilize when rethinking and/or refreshing Customer Persona.

Here is a supporting blog post providing an example of how we applied the 30 Elements of Value Framework to rethink customer persona at a client of ours, Canada Goose, a luxury fashion apparel brand.

Client Quotes

what our clients have to say

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“Before, our personas weren’t informed by the voice of the customer. They were simply our own internal ideas as to who our customers were and what was important to them.”
“We didn’t have a good understanding of the various underlying motivations for travel before, and whether people were selecting the right small group adventure to fit their needs.”
“Reading through the customer comments was really really insightful. It provided us with a much clearer picture of the customer’s mindset when considering our product.”
“It’s clear when you read the customer comments that while our customers recognize us for product innovation and quality however there is little connection with our other brand values.”

Want to learn about work we've done for other clients? Helping them build an improved understanding of the customer journey.

 

It's time to refresh our personas

Does this sound like your company?

That’s us. Our existing customer personas don’t represent who our current targeted customer segments. Our customers have evolved over time.

Schedule a quick chat to learn more about How to refresh your customer personaS leveraging the Voice of the Customer

 

Case Studies

Recent client engagements

 
Customer Centric Solutions :: ecobee smart thermostat on wall

ecobee

Ecobee

ecobee is a home automation company that makes wi-fi enabled smart thermostats for residential and commerical applications that are intuitive to use and beautiful to look at while providing comfort and savings for consumers and businesses.

Approach:

Set out to build an understanding of different smart home consumer segements looking at different consumer motivations, values and attitudes regarding smart home technology and automation. Conducted multi-day online focus group to listen to homeowners tell their own personal stories about the progress they were looking to make in their lives, the problems they were seeking to solve, their attitudes towards energy consumption (personal and global), and the role of technology in their lives. Immediately followed with quantitative survey to cluster smart home consumers around the shared motivations, values and attitudes.

Result:

Defined three targeted persona representing differences in relationship to the role of technology in their lives, their motivations for investing in smart home technology, and the relative importance to them of value, design, control, energy savings, and/or saving the planet.

Talk With Us

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G Adventures

G Adventures

G Adventures is a small-group adventure travel company offering more than 700 different tours in more than 100 countries. It strong brand is built around 5 core values, one of which is “We LOVE change people’s lives”.

Approach:

Set out to build an understanding of different traveller segements looking at motivation for travel, values and attitudes around small group travel. Conducted multi-day online focus group to listen to travellers tell their own personal stories and uncover key themes for segmenting them. Immediately followed with quantitative survey to cluster travellers around the shared motivations, values and attitudes.

Result:

Defined four targeted personas having unique motivations for why they traveled, different travel preferences (e.g., pace, transportation, small group, itinerary, lodging, and meals), and things that were important to them before, during, and after travel.

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Is it time to refresh your personas?


Schedule a quick chat to learn more about how listening to the voice of the customer can help you revise and improve your customer personas.