To enhance your ability to experience the needs of a customer for a product, and better understand the experience the customer or potential customer has with your product, it's always best to start out with a Customer Target Market. This is called creating customer personas, you have an idea who the customer might be to help guide you on who you should observe. When you're developing a product or service idea, you have some preconceived notion of who that customer might be. But in this case, we want to develop the persona so that helps guide who we observe in the marketplace. So it can be the ideal customer or the average customer, I would say start out with who is the ideal customer for your particular product or service. Then, think in terms of the customer what their buying patterns are, what their buying habits are, and how they previously solved the problem in which they are looking for a product or service. What are their motivations? In addition to the motivations, what are the underlying socio-demographic data that defines them as a target market group. So, the custom persona is a target representation of who you'll likely to sell the product to, and who's likely to be most interested in your product. The key questions you'll want to ask in developing a customer persona is first, What experiences are customers looking for when they're buying your products or service?, so this helps you to better understand the motivations behind, why certain customers buy certain products, why certain customers want to experience things in a particular way? Now, focusing on those customers, the second question is, What are customers problems with your product or service? Now, if you're first introducing a product, you won't be able to address this. But I would try to find information on how customers have evaluated previous or similar products. For example, Consumer Reports does evaluation of numerous consumer products on a regular basis where you can get the reviews of what customers are saying, both positive and negatively about a product. So if you don't have a product in place, look at a comparable product that has been reviewed in the marketplace and use that information as a starting point. So next question is, what would make them choose your product over competitors? I remember in the House of Quality, we've already gone through a Tradeoff Analysis to look at what things we need to improve that make us better than competition. So now, we should be able to identify those areas that we can do better than our competitors on particular benefits or product attributes that they're looking for. If this is not the first time of the person in your product, they've already developed their idea of a ideal type product. If it is their first time, then you have to think in terms of how do you establish your particular benefits as the standard by which customers will evaluate all other competitor products. Then finally, in developing the persona is, what hurdles do they currently face when purchasing your product or service?. So these are just a set of five questions that you can start out with when you're trying to decide on what that customer persona may look like. Now, if we answer those questions we might develop customer personas that looks something like this. One is a stay at home mom, 30 years old, married, she has two kids, one three year old and six year old, she's the primary shopper, housekeeper, and cook for the family but she hates grocery shopping, but takeaway shops at a local produce store or mass merchandise at least once a week. She uses coupons so she's not necessarily brand loyal. And you would say that this person says. "I just got the store brand because it was the cheapest". So she's trying to provide for a family, and she's looking for deals in the grocery store but she really hates grocery shopping. Alternatively, a second person might be, the Millennial Mom, they're a little bit older, 35, but still married. They have one child, but works full time, has high income, but she still wants to be family oriented, and make sure her family is taken care of. In addition to working full time, she likes to work out, she's very digitally savvy, can get online and she shops online. So, she loves to work, travel, and pamper her baby. So now, you have kind of a picture. Well, it's a fictional representation of what that customer might look like. So we're selling some type or developing some type of shopping service, we now can go to one or more of these particular customers to evaluate their experiences either directly, through a survey, or maybe just walking through the store with them and observing how they go about shopping in the store or looking at the online shopping behavior of these two types of customers in the marketplace. Our objective is to identify the experiences but more so, what they like about it and what they dislike about it. So the Customer Persona Profile allows you to target your customer experience mapping techniques when you're trying to better engage in how the customer engages with your product and service. And you want to build a profile of that when you create a template that looks something like this but is not limited to this, you can develop your own template. You can see that you have identified who the customer is in terms of the persona, millennial mom, work at home mom, you have some demographic data: age, occupation, marital status. You've tried to identify what you think are their shopping habits are. If you can, what type of personality would that person be like? And then, as you develop your persona, what would be something that would be like a personal quote that identifies that particular individual? Based upon that, you want to identify whether the three problems they're going to have in terms of their current solution to whatever product or service that they're looking at. Now, based upon those problem, you can then identify your goals but then at the end, you are just collecting information to see how well a particular product or service meets those goals, given the problem that you've identified. That is the process of developing a customer persona, and it's important when you're trying to determine or experience the way in which the customer engages your product or service. So it's the first step in developing a in-depth understanding from an empathetic standpoint, and understanding your customer needs, and putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. Creating this fictional persona will allow you to then go to the next step of mapping the customer experience with your product.
