Customer Personas

How to Use Customer Personas

Different customers can experience the same journey in very different ways, so it’s important to gain insight into each of your customer’s unique needs. Identifying customer personas helps you understand your customers’ behavior by individualizing the experience based on shared attributes. If you try to delight your customers by treating all of them the same way, you risk not pleasing any of them! Use customer personas to tailor how you measure and improve the experience. These insights will make your customer experience efforts more effective, your initiatives more efficient, and your business more successful.

Jim Tincher

Experiences Designed for Everybody Satisfy Nobody

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In my role as Heart of the Customer’s mapper-in-chief, I get the opportunity to view a lot of journey maps. Beautiful ones, ugly ones, those built to drive change, and those that are little more than gussied-up Excel spreadsheets.

But, as mentioned in our book, one thing that continues to surprise me is how few include personas. In our research a few years back, we found that nearly one-third of the CX practitioners surveyed didn’t include segments or personas in their work.

That’s a big mistake.

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Life Insurance Journey Map
Jim Tincher

Journey mapping tools don’t address the most critical challenges.

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There are a ton of journey mapping tools out there. I’m most familiar with Touchpoint Dashboard, but I’ve had demos from many others. They all excel at certain components of journey mapping, but they don’t (and probably can’t) address some of the largest problems.

That’s because the biggest reasons journey maps fail have nothing to do with digital problems; they’re analog. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, the biggest problem in journey mapping is that it’s done in silos. Small teams are created to do journey mapping. Those small teams intimately learn the customer experience, but because they don’t control the critical touch points, the effort fails to drive change.

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Jim Tincher

It’s not Necessarily a Design Issue

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I regularly receive emails that go something like this: 

I have almost completed my organization’s journey map! Can you give me some design suggestions before I share it with my company?

This request comes from a good place, a desire to educate the company about the customer’s journey, but after a few questions, it quickly falls apart.

What’s the Problem Here?

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