Making your business processes more customer-centered with personas

Can you identify critical success factors common to each of these mission-critical business processes?

• Inventing new products
• Improving the design of existing products and services
• Communicating a compelling value proposition
• Engaging channel partners in selling your product
• Providing effective customer support through digital channels

Customer insight can improve the outcomes of these processes at a level far beyond how much it costs to obtain. So what is customer "insight" and how does it differ from customer research-data? Practically speaking, it's not an "insight" if it lacks one of these qualities:

1. Agreement - without shared understanding and agreement, the interpretation of research data can be mired in opinion wars
2. Vividness - information without vividness fails to motivate belief, imagination and action
3. Context - marketplace knowledge gains predictive power as observations are pulled together in context

The central contribution of personas? They transform customer research-data into vivid, shared context. They clarify the important problems to be solved. They offer a multi-dimensional perspective on the people for whom these problems are important. And in doing so, they give project teams an enhanced ability to project customer reactions and agree upon solutions that fit.

In this way, personas lend incremental efficiency to discrete business processes, including product development, communications, sales and service interface development. This function alone is valuable. Personas can also help with a problem that bedevils most large corporations - customer experience gaps that crop up as a result of siloed organizational execution. To the extent that personas create vivid shared context across business processes and organizational boundaries, they offer the potential for transformational improvements in customer experience.

Want to know more?

For more information on our persona services, contact Glen Drummond by email or give him a call at 519.570.2020 or toll-free in North America at 888.570.2020.