Becoming a customer-centric organization? Start with personas

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How do you ensure that your organization becomes and remains customer centric? Do you start with customer journey mapping, a new CRM system or with personalized newsletters? You can only really decide that if you know your customers inside and out: their needs, motivations, fears and desires. A first step on the road to customer centricity: create personas. They help you and your colleagues make decisions that put your customer at the center of your long-term strategy and daily work processes.


Personas and customer centric thinking
In a customer-centric organization, decisions are made based on the needs of the customer. That is no easy task. We are quickly inclined to take our own needs as a reference, to look at competitors or to take assumptions about the customer as a starting point.

Ideally, you would like to have the customer at your table, but because that is often not feasible, you go for the next best thing : personas. A persona helps you to not only think about the customer, but also to think like the customer. A general definition:

A persona is a short description of a reference person with a name and character traits who represents the needs, goals and personal characteristics of a target group. A personification of a specific target group.

examplepersona
A persona for developing website content aimed at job seekers. Source: Nielsen Norman

The power of personas
So what exactly is the power of working with personas? How do personas contribute to a customer-centric organization?

1. A persona brings raw data to life
You probably have a report or presentation lying around somewhere full of graphs and figures about your target group(s). The problem is that they are often too complex and abstract and can be interpreted in different ways. Maybe you also have customer profiles: 'the director' or 'the buyer'. An average interaction designer or communications employee can hardly imagine the needs and expectations of 'the director'. He hardly comes into contact with them.

Working with this raw data or customer profiles makes customer-oriented thinking difficult and it doesn't have to be. By putting the data and customer profiles in the format of a algeria telegram number list persona, you bring them to life with their own drives, motivations and needs. That helps you think like the customer. The human ability to empathize with others is optimally utilized by it.

2. A persona facilitates internal communication and the work process
There is a good chance that your image of 'the customer' does not match that of your colleagues. Creating a persona with your colleagues helps to discuss these differences and to arrive at a clear picture of the customer needs, for example information needs or contact preference.

You also develop a common language in thinking and talking about the customer. It is easier to talk about the persona 'Anouk' than to refer to a mountain of graphs from a report.

It is easier to talk about the persona 'Anouk' than to refer to a mountain of graphs from a report.

A clear image and a common language are the basis for customer-oriented service, consistent communication and effective product development.

3. A persona speeds up the work process and makes it more effective
Once you have personas, they help you make progress. You and your team can focus on what is necessary for the personas. You ignore the other bulk of information and requests from colleagues.

Personas also make it easy to determine what to do first, for example when creating an intranet. If you want to support nurses on the intranet, start with the features that the persona 'nurse' needs. What other target groups need automatically gets less priority. An additional advantage: because you know what the persona needs, you only develop content and features that will actually be used.

4. A persona helps you make customer-oriented decisions
A persona is a means to quickly make research results and customer needs clear: a summary of the most important knowledge and insights, preferably on one A4. As a marketer, interaction designer or communication advisor, you make thousands of small decisions over long periods that influence the customer experience. Use that persona for every decision, to ensure that knowledge about the target group is used at the right time.

When push comes to shove, a persona can also give you arguments to defend your decisions and resolve disagreements. Not based on what the highest in the pecking order wants, but because you can demonstrate what the customer wants. It is a must that your persona is based on target group research and not on your assumptions.