Written by It is key to understand your different customer types and serve them the way they want to be served. It simply doesn’t work when you put all customers/visitors/prospects in the same bucket.
A highly optimized CX program allows you to gain intelligence about your customer types. Key questions about your customers:
- Internal or External: The overall scope of those you serve may be internal customers as well; employees, partners or other government agencies. To be successful, you need to listen to all who you serve. For our Federal Government friends, remember, 85% of those you serve are outside the beltway. It is critical for leaders to reach out and understand the needs of those across the country and around the world.
- Frequency: How frequently are they interacting with your organization or brand? You need to serve first-time visitors differently than you do frequent visitors. It’s key to be able to segment data on frequency of visit especially when your goal is to attract and acquire new customers.
- Intent: When a visitor comes to your site but does not make a purchase, is that a bad thing? The answer may be NO. Maybe that individual was just doing research and then made a purchase in store. Understanding visitor intent is key to understanding the customer journey and how one channel contributes to another.
- What do customers want and How do they want it?: It would be ideal if everyone who interacted with your brand, association, agency would self-serve via digital. But unfortunately that’s not the case. People from all demographics traverse the multiple channels you are on and they want to be able to get information online, make a purchase or be serviced directly from social media, browse in a store or stop in a service center, or make a quick call to the call center to check spending limits. Much has been made about the “customer journey” and for good reason; we live in a multi-channel world and customers expect to be able to interact how they want, where they want…seamlessly.
Building Personas
When you make the decision to put CX in the middle of all strategic planning, the development of Customer Personas is the best way for your team to understand who you are serving.
A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of one of your customer types based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
When creating your customer persona(s), consider including customer demographics like age, gender, location, occupation, education level. Leverage analytic tools to understand behavior patterns, motivations, emotions and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
Customer personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. A detailed customer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
Invest the Time
It’s key to take the time and get smarter about your customers. When you deliver personalized service, based on likes, dislikes and true understanding of the customer type, you will both be rewarded; now and in the future.
Dave Lewan 