Navigating the Successful Use of Personas in Turbulent Times

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Short Description

Companies can thrive through turbulence if they deliver valuable customer experiences (CX). The leaders, just 5% of all businesses, rely on persona intelligence (PI). Please join this engaging discussion about customer experience and persona development best practices as it pertains to leadership decision making for industry and the academy.

Detailed Abstract

For business, turbulent times are omnipresent. Now more than ever, businesses must find ways to be better and different for customers while being more profitable. A small number of companies do this very well, particularly during times of uncertainty. Yet they account for just 5% of all businesses worldwide according to J.D. Power (As cited in Bean2). They are leaders that dominate their industries, marginalize competition and have unusually high rates of customer advocacy.
Examples include companies like Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, and newer businesses including Square, Uber, Airbnb and Tesla. They are “Experience Maker” companies. They have navigated uncertain times successfully by surpassing product offers, services, and price with purpose-built customer experiences (CX). These experiences consistently create energized customer advocates. What makes these companies different? How do they do it? What do they know that the remaining 95% of companies should for success in turbulent times?
At the center of the best business practices for these “Experience Maker” companies is a “persona level understanding” of present and future customers. This Persona Intelligence (PI) goes well beyond the traditional understanding of market segments and customer profiles. Persona intelligence is an integral part of business leadership, culture and decision making at the best.
These Experience Makers understand that determining, developing and delivering persona-based customer experience allows them to transcend traditional customer satisfaction and customer service. Persona-based customer experience is critical in developing and delivering multiple successful customer interactions throughout the customer’s journey, from discovery to advocacy. The type of experience where customers feel that promises made are promises kept (Steinhart, 2010).
“Customer experience involves the connection that individuals form with organizations, based on their experiences with the offerings and activities of the organization” (Vivek, et. al., 2012, p. 133). Engagement is a construct that for CX is embedded in the creation of purposeful interactions. It is not an idle process. Entities that embrace true CX best practices, typically not only survive, but thrive, particularly in turbulent times. These leading entities develop their customer experience strategy beginning with a firm understanding and usage of customer personas (Bean & Van Tyne, 2012). Personas are often based on emotion of the types of customers that represent a company’s products and services (Miaskiewicz & Kozer, 2011). Personas are often visualized in terms of caricature. An imaging and text representation of real existing and potential customers (Bean2, 2015).
Personas are an essential foundation of business strategy particularly during turbulent times. Personas improve: product development, user testing outcomes, user interface design and customer advocacy. Thus in order to craft memorable strategic experiences, categorizing customer personas are paramount and leadership from every segment of the company must have buy in (Simson, 2015).
According to Gardner (2015), the best method to measure CX is to, “Look at factors relevant to your customers”(As cited in Bean2, 2015, p. 27). The goal of the total customer experience starts with a firm foundation of customer personas. Based on persona intelligence (PI) these real customers can become brand advocates. The concept involves creating valuable and memorable CX that meets the various categories of personas, allowing each to further interact with the organization. The actual user experiences or UX within the customer experience of the Websites, mobile presences and actual products or services are the proof that promises made from the beginning of the CX, regardless if they were implicit or explicit, are kept and clear and ultimately lead to a new construct we dub as ROPE or Return on Persona Engagement.
Please join us for this engaging session about customer experience and persona development best practices and leadership decision making for industry and the academy (Bean1, 2015). Developing effective personas and how personas are being applied at Intuit (TurboTax®) and Mitchell International, for example, and programs for scaling personas company-wide for strategic advantage also are highlighted.
Key topics include:
• The percentage of companies that really understand Customer Experience
• Best practices in turbulent times - The Customer Experience 3Ds
• Best Practice Customer Experience and User Experience Strategies
with Personas
• Specific Persona Examples from X, Y and Z
• How Personas are used by teams
• Developing Persona Intelligence for determining, developing,
delivering, and measuring valuable CX

Participants

• Erik Bean, University of Phoenix

• Jeofrey Bean, University of California at San Diego