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 customers experience efforts more effective, your initiatives more efficient, and your business more successful.

How a 10-page Report Can Help You Win Your Customer

May 1, 2019/0 Comments/in B2B Journeys (or B2B2C), Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Cathy McLane

This post, written by Heart of the Customer Project Manager Cathy McLane, is the second in a week-long series about some of the ways journey mapping differs from traditional market research. Guest authors Corey Pawlak, Cathy McLane and Nicole Newton will share their expertise in recruiting and interviewing B2B customers, why 10-page reports are better than 50-page reports, and using video to bring the customer experience to life.

As a strategic communications advisor and program manager, I’ve seen my share of customer insights reports. They’ve ranged from 50 pages with data tables on every page to succinct PowerPoint presentations that have cool animations but very few actionable insights.

Who’s the Right Customer to Map? Your Third Journey Mapping Question

April 3, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

Note: We’re celebrating the upcoming launch of our new book “How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Customer Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change,” by Mapper-In-Chief Jim Tincher and B2B Practice Lead Nicole Newton. We’re using the launch as a cheesy excuse to walk through the Five Journey Mapping Questions.

Two weeks ago, Jim covered “What’s the Business Problem or Opportunity,” and, last week, Nicole introduced the topic of “What is the Right Journey?”

Defining Scope: Should You Map an End-to-End Journey or a Specific Sub-Journey?

March 28, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Employee Experience, Minneapolis CX, Voice of the Customer /by Nicole Newton

Editor’s Note: As we get ready for our book launch in May, we’re previewing the major topics. This post was written by co-author Nicole Newton, HoC’s B2B Practice Lead. You can read more about our book at https://heartofthecustomer.com/book/.

Mapping the Right Journey

At Heart of the Customer, we recommend starting a journey mapping project by answering these five questions:

What is the business problem or opportunity behind mapping?
What is the right journey to map?
Who is the right customer to map?
What is the right approach to gathering the voice of your customer?
Who are the right people to be on your journey mapping team?

Three Common Customer Journey Mapping Business Cases

March 21, 2019/0 Comments/in B2B Journeys (or B2B2C), Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience /by Jim Tincher

Editor’s Note: As we get ready for our book launch in May, we’re previewing the major topics. You can read more about our book at https://heartofthecustomer .com/book/.

What differentiates a mapping program that drives action from one that doesn’t? A major factor is the reason for doing journey mapping in the first place.

We can confidently predict whether a mapping program will be successful in our very first conversation. Does the company have a solid reason they want to do mapping? Or is it because they heard it’s a good thing to do?

How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer Journey Mapping Book

Introducing “How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Maps to Drive Customer-Focused Change”

March 12, 2019/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Interviews with CX Experts, Minneapolis CX, Surveys and Feedback, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

At Heart of the Customer, we’re pleased to introduce our forthcoming book on journey mapping best practices!

Journey mapping opens up extraordinary avenues for business growth, but only when done wisely and well. Through insight from CX pros, extensive research, and real-world case studies, you can learn the best way to capture your customers’ experiences to drive action that gets results, boosting loyalty, satisfaction, and your bottom line.

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

November 15, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience, Minneapolis CX, Surveys and Feedback, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

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.

Too many see journey mapping as an employee workshop.

November 14, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Employee Experience, Minneapolis CX, Surveys and Feedback, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

What is journey mapping?

That may seem like a strange question from a blogger whose title is “Mapper-In-Chief,” but there’s so much confusion on the topic that it’s a question that needs to be asked.

This confusion is fueled by vendors who offer “journey mapping workshops.” This is a half- or full-day workshop where you gather a bunch of employees who each adopt a customer persona and use Post-It Notes to document your perceptions of that customer’s journey. Oracle hosts this type of workshop, and by all accounts it’s a ton of fun. It’s possible they mention the need to actually talk with customers, but the attendees I’ve spoken to don’t remember them saying that.

It’s not Necessarily a Design Issue

October 25, 2018/0 Comments/in Customer Experience Vision, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy, Driving CX Culture Change, Voice of the Customer /by Jim Tincher

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. There are at least three problems with this request.

An experience designed for everybody helps nobody

March 7, 2017/1 Comment/in Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Personas, CX Program Strategy /by Jim Tincher

One unforeseen result from our journey mapping best practices survey was that a surprising number of practitioners – almost one-third – do not use segments or personas in their journey maps.

If you don’t use personas in your maps, then you probably don’t design around specific types of customers. And that’s a real risk.

Because customers are different. And if you’re not using personas to capture those differences to design your experiences, it’s likely that you’re missing some important nuances in your experience design.