How do you create and use customer profiles/personas?
I want to create better customer profiles and personas as this will help me to tuning my messaging, marketing, onboarding processes and product development.
This means to better describe who my customers are, what job I'm doing for them, their pains, feeling, process etc.
I have a number of resources like the book; jobs to be done, some customer journey templates and I'm interested to hear how you created your customer profiles and how do you use them/keep them updated?
How did you create customer profiles/personas/journeys? Do you have any good references (links/books anything?) you can recommend? Is there any aspect specifically that helped you the most?
One thing that worked really well for me is to capture the aha moment when customer subscribe, I'm using these moments in the onboarding process to give people tips so they can experience the same moment.
#ask-ih
My tool is placker.com; a SaaS to get work done across teams and projects.
Hey, I'm the founder of https://configcat.com
What has worked for me extremely well is talking to ALL my customers after they have registered PLUS right after they have purchased a subscription.
I've asked them
This way I have discovered that they share a few common characteristics.
What I felt was that it's not the customer persona what I have discovered, but it's the decision-maker persona. Today I know who are the people who decide whether their company will use my service or one of my competitors'.
I suggest you simply write an email / chat with your users as much as you can about
Do you have strong competition? When did you start with your business?
Great to hear and this is actually also how we get information from our subscribers, we are now sitting on a lot of information that we are going to process in more structured customer journeys and personas so we can better learn from it and use it to improve our marketing, onboarding and product roadmap.
Do you use different customer persona's/journeys in your communication (the dev lead, the product manager, vp of product/engineering maybe?)
And good point on the decision maker persona, we have actually added a number of messages and features to make it simpler for our customers to inform the decision maker. (e-mail reports for example) In the end the decision make will pay your bill so it is important to understand her pain as well and make sure the product is visible to them.
I've been working on Placker for 4.5 years now, competition in the productivity space is extremely strong so our focus has always been on our added value; to get insight and oversight in managing work, (think easy ways to plan, track and report work), not so much to create a new productivity tool.
Great to see we are on the same path. However, I see the situation a bit differently.
My experience is that it's not always the decision maker who pays the bill. Let me give you an example: for configcat.com it's often an architect/dev lead/CTO who decides whether their company will use my service (or they choose another feature flag service). But it's very often someone else in my decision makers company who has the budget to pay for it. And there is a third group of relevant users for me: the actual users who will use my service on a daily bases. So I have 3 personas:
I have different goals for each group:
It took me a while until I figured out the #1 factor that distracts my Buyers. It's something I consider now my secret weapon (but I can tell you that in private so you can use it as an example and adapt it to your business if you want). The basic idea is to help the Decision Maker convince the Buyer (or at least not to distract him).
I read you capture the aha moments of your users. I want to get better in this myself. Can you tell me how you do that?
Good point on the difference as we indeed target the decision maker as the one deciding the budget but this is often another department that has different questions (do we not have tool X that does the same?).
As for the Aha moment, we ask our subscribers questions along the following lines;
We usually follow up in a call to better understand the users and how placker helps them in order to capture these moments better.
Ah, OK, thanks. Did you find a way to make Placker measure/capture the Aha moment itself automatically?
We don't measure this automatically although we do measure some metrics around it.