How to Create Personas for a Better Customer Experience

The usage of personas to create a better customer experience

The development of personas is a good way to begin this process and to get understand your clients and what they want in life (and from your product).

4P square organised a masterclass dealing with this theme. In this article, a summary on the usage of personas will be provided, followed by a case study.

How to create your company’s personas

• Analyse data

Companies constantly gather data about their customer’s. The trick however is to use these data wisely by using them for the development of personas.

You should start with analysing some basic data when it comes to the creation of personas: demographics like the age ranges or professions of customer group(s), consumption behavior and so on.

• Develop personas

When you have gathered the right data, you can start designing the company’s personas.

The goal is not to create a vague figure and to get an indefinite idea on what this figures needs are, but to make the persona very personal and give him/her a name and face.

Furthermore, you must develop clear demographics, think about what exactly this person needs/wants in life, what his/her challenges are and how your company can answer to this personas need with specific products or services.

Because not every client is the same, you must think about your different types of clients as different segments and ideally develop an average of 3 personas, one for each segment.

• Test the validity of the personas

Collaboration between different departments is key in companies, also when it comes to personas.

Validate whether the persona that you developed matches with the picture of the company’s clients that lives amongst departments like corporate communications, Business Intelligence, Sales, …

Only if the whole company agrees on the personas, you can start to adapt your marketing strategy to these personas and bring them to life.

• Make choices and implement

Based on the previous step, you can choose which personas to use and which personas to drop.

Now you really need to make it happen and start creating a marketing strategy with a communication plan and customer journey adapted to the different personas.

Every persona has a different experience with your product and prefers different communication channels. Pick them wisely and you will be able to target the right person!

Case study: airport personas

Airports are very vivid and fast-changing environments so we thought it would be interesting to think about airport-specific personas during a 4P workshop.

We determined two general profiles of airport passengers: the ‘leisure’ and the ‘business’ passengers.

This means it’s very important for the airport to think about these personas customer journeys in a different way and look for different opportunities to satisfy their needs.