How we use data-driven personas to radically improve the customer experience

Most of the conversations around people happen with marketing or product teams. These groups use personas to define typical customers by their demographics, tastes, values, backgrounds, goals, challenges, aspirations, etc. A person profile includes a picture and some statements that represent the person.

You can include where to reach that person, especially for marketing purposes. The product team could use it for successful product design so that a product is sticky, has higher performance, and has fewer glitches.

The use of people-based services in implementation, customer support, and customer success lay an essential foundation for startups and early-stage businesses. We did, and it has transformed our company.

It started with an internal commitment to become a 100% customer-centric organization. We knew we could improve the customer experience, which was good, but not the level we strive for. We satisfy customers, but we didn’t excite them either. We look at every process, deliverable, product, and customer engagement through the lens of the customer and are committed to a method of constant reinvention to improve the customer experience.

So, we dive into the numbers.

Although each client’s implementation was different, there were some similarities and features that we could compare across various sets of clients. We examined 250 data points: about two-thirds were internal, and the rest came from secondary research on the company and the market.

Some of the items we saw were:

• Have they used a competitor’s software?
• What is your reason for choosing us?
• Are you transitioning from spreadsheets and files?
• What specific problems are they trying to solve? For example, one client noticed that competitors provided partner quotes within hours, unlike his company, which took several days.
• What is your main goal to achieve with our software?

We add this intelligence to the standard knowledge transfer call between sales and implementation teams to learn as much about the customer as possible. We use all those points to categorize each customer into one of four people. These people work for us. Your customer data can lead you to create the people who matter most in your customer base.

We categorized our implementations into four different personas.

• Simplicity — Focused on speed of implementation, time to success, and out-of-the-box functionality. CSMs need to be involved in 30-60-90 day planning and best practices from the start.
• Marketing — Focused on design and partner experience. They can ask 10 questions about the image gallery on the partner portal home page. They will ask about specific design elements, like whether buttons can have rounded corners instead of squares, etc.