Article
Personas connect retailers, shoppers
Fictional customers can lead to real-world improvements.
March 16, 2008 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance
Nicole is a 34-year-old woman who recently got engaged. She has settled in Atlanta, where she works as a physical therapist. She's pretty tight with her girlfriends, but all that is changing now that she's so busy planning her wedding. She makes $58,000 a year.
Lisa is 38, married and has one child. She's a stay-at-home mom but sells Avon to make a little extra money on the side. Lisa isn't into technology — she uses computers and related gadgets only to do what needs doing, and usually has to ask for help when it comes time to make a purchase. She and her husband bring in a combined $55,000 a year.
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Retailers who use personas generally have more than one. Fine detail about the "individuals" helps focus management and employees' thoughts about the customer. (Copyright Forrester Research, 2007) |
Profiles vs. personas
Retailers long have used customer profiles as a way to focus on customer needs and plan marketing and product selection accordingly. Profiling breaks the retail audience down into basic demographic groups: 18- to 24-year-olds, soccer moms, middle-aged dads, white-collar workers, etc.
Personas take that segmentation a step further by creating a fictional individual, complete with a fleshed-out back story.
"The terms 'customer profile' and 'customer persona' are often times confused and even grouped as one and the same," said Michael Brown, customer service consultant and author of "Fresh Customer Service." "Though they feed off of each other, there is a distinct difference."
Profiles treat each customer within similar demographic groups as equals. For instance, an 18- to 24-year-old male customer in one department store is effectively the same as any other 18- to 24-year-old male shopping at any other department store.
"With customer personas, each and every 18- to 24-year-old male customer who might visit your particular
department store will approach the buying process in a different way and have different problems he needs to solve," Brown said. "Understanding customer personas is how you develop and deliver a more relevant and unique shopping experience that will help beat your competition, and gain repeat and loyal customers for life."
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Profiling breaks down a retailer's audience into basic demographic groups based on race, gender, age, income, etc. But personas go further and create a complete fictional individual. (Copyright, Forrester Research, 2007) |
In her report "Best and Worst of Personas, 2007," Forrester's Dorsey isolated three requirements for effective customer personas:
1. They must be based on ethnographic research.Interviews with, and observation of, real shoppers can reveal goals, attitudes and behaviors that focus groups and surveys cannot. Dozens of interviews might be conducted to gather the information needed to create a single persona.
2. They must be developed into archetypes that represent key behaviors.These archetypes become avatars for customers. Putting a real face and name to these fictional characters makes it possible for decision-makers and experience planners to get inside the mind of the shopper more completely.
3. Once built, they must be used consistently.Workers at every step of the design process should be reminded who exactly they are designing the experience for. Personas also should be shared with any employee who interacts with customers, in order to foster a deeper sense of empathy. According to Dorsey, most personas are developed by creative agencies or Web design firms. Costs vary, but can be as much as $50,000 for a single persona.
Building the perfect persona
So what do you get for that money? When a persona is done right, you get what appears to be a few pages of text and photos, but actually is a powerful design and customer-service tool.
Take Lisa Parks, the 38-year-old technophobe mom. She was developed for Dell by Canadian creative agency Critical Mass, which also developed the Dell Web site. Lisa is a fully fleshed-out individual, complete with photos of her, her child and her home. Attributes and behaviors are broken out and ranked, and a complete back story for her was written. Notice the level of detail in her biography:
Lisa's been using the Internet for about three years, and she goes online daily to keep herself occupied. It started as a distraction when her son Zach was napping, but has grown into an important part of her everyday routine. In fact, she converted the family office into a joint playroom, so she can keep an eye on Zach while surfing the Web, looking up current events, health-related information for her family and sometimes shopping for products she can't find at local stores.
It's not just details that are captured, but personality, as well. In the case of Nicole, who was designed several years ago by Chicago-based WHITTMANHART for a beverage company, the persona is written in the first-person, to better enable that personality to come across:
I'm always looking for something new. That's why I'm always online, I mean ALWAYS. Looking for the next cool thing, especially something a little "girly" for me and my girlfriends to try out. Oh and, of course, it doesn't hurt to check out the latest on Brad and Jen's turmoil!
Nicole's persona goes even further into the aspects that make her a unique individual and includes a list of goals she has for her life, things that annoy her, a personal history and a schedule from a sample day in her life.
Dorsey said a good persona always will sound like a real person, and will be built upon a compelling story. Personas should single out the key attributes and goals of the person — and ultimately, they must be useful to make design decisions.
"Personas play the role of the end-user during the design process, so they should help design teams understand what users need and want," she said.
Putting personas to work
Once a retailer has developed and settled on its personas, the real work begins. Personas have two key points of implementation: experience design and customer service.
Dorsey said personas create a shared understanding of customer goals, attitudes and behaviors. Besides reducing debate at the design stage, they also make it possible to prioritize the many possible options that can be worked into the customer experience, allowing the design team to focus on the best choices to implement first.
An even bigger benefit may come in the form of improved customer service. Personas, when communicated throughout the company, can get front-line employees thinking about individual customer needs and the stories behind them.
"All humans are, genetically, 99.5 percent identical," said Steve Yastrow, author of "We: The Ideal Customer Relationship." "So, if you look for and track the interesting features of each customer's last half percent, the things that make them unlike other people, you will be better able to have a rich, powerful, relationship-building encounter with that customer the next time they are in your store."
As an example, take an electronics store employee, one who has solid knowledge of computer networking. His day-to-day attitude about wireless routers probably focuses on the technical aspects — what it can do, which iterations of 802.11 it supports, how secure it is. But if he is introduced to the story of Lisa Parks, he begins to see that router not just as a product but as a means for her to be online in the room where Zach is napping.
It's a fundamental change in attitude, a shift from "What can we sell you?" to "What needs do you have that we can help you meet?"
"Their proper use can be the difference between treating a customer like a number, and showing that customer you understand her as a person," Yastrow said.
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