Content Marketing Strategy

customer persona case study

4 Powerful Buyer Persona Case Studies that Transformed These Businesses

January 22, 2024

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By Tomislav

Key Takeaways

Pegasystems : Effective buyer personas aligned departments and enhanced marketing, leading to increased interactions, leads, and conversion rates. Twilio : Correct buyer personas are essential for efficient content strategy, especially in new markets, optimizing both production and distribution. Skytap : Continuously refining buyer personas is crucial, focusing on understanding decision-makers to improve marketing effectiveness. Genesis Systems Group : Developed buyer personas, using internal insights, significantly improved marketing alignment and customer-centricity, boosting lead generation.

#1 Pegasystems Case Study

customer persona case study

Pegasystems (Pega) is a software company specializing in customer relationship management, digital process automation, and business process management.

As a global entity with 41 locations across 4 continents , Pega’s use of buyer personas to drive business results is noteworthy, even for a large company.

What prompted Pega to create and refine their buyer personas ?

A striking quote from Pega sums it up: “ We are Pega centric when we need to be Customer centric. “

Admitting this, especially for a company of Pega’s magnitude, required courage and self-awareness.

Additional reasons for Pega’s development of buyer personas include:

  • Aligning Marketing and Sales teams
  • Understanding customers better for more effective engagement
  • Tailoring approaches to different customer segments
  • Transitioning from outbound to inbound marketing
  • Creating purposeful content instead of improvising

Pega’s honest and thorough self-assessment was a pivotal step in enhancing their marketing strategy.

Upon identifying issues and objectives, Pega delineated 3 distinct buyer personas.

They conducted a content audit , aligning existing materials with their personas and buyer journey to pinpoint content gaps.

Realizing the need for more depth, they sought to enrich their personas with data like:

  • Most influential information sources for corporate purchases
  • Effective tactics for information gathering
  • Networking and learning platforms used by their customers
  • Active online forums and social networks for professional interactions

Pega invested months in data analysis and even collaborated with an external agency for extra expertise.

customer persona case study

This effort yielded immediate results :

  • Interactions with target accounts increased by over 20% (300 per month)
  • Marketing-generated leads rose by over 10% (35 per month)
  • Pipeline opportunities and value grew by over 10% (4 opportunities, $3 million per month)
  • Conversion rate of leads to opportunities jumped from 32% to over 40%
  • Marketing-sourced opportunities in the pipeline increased by 20%
  • Buyer personas ensure alignment across departments and consistency within teams.
  • Comprehensive content across the buyer’s journey is crucial, with buyer personas being the foundational step.
  • Incorporating buyer personas into your content strategy can significantly boost leads and opportunities .

#2 Twilio Case Study

customer persona case study

Twilio operates in the cloud communications platform-as-a-service industry.

This case study showcases a broad content marketing approach where buyer personas played a crucial role.

Twilio, well-known among developers in the cloud communications sector, faced challenges when expanding into the Product Management suite.

Entering new territory, Twilio needed to engage a new audience for broader product adoption.

They partnered with Campaign Stars, a customer acquisition platform, for swift production of engaging content.

Campaign Stars analyzed Twilio’s ideal customer journey, focusing on developing new buyer personas.

A key insight was that product managers and team leaders make purchasing decisions, even though developers use Twilio’s products.

With this knowledge, Campaign Stars crafted new buyer personas targeting these decision-makers.

An essential strategy was to create content assets to capture the attention of these decision-makers.

Campaign Stars transformed an underused 60-page Twilio white paper into an interactive microsite – making it “appealing, educational, and digestible.”

customer persona case study

This white paper was the most notable among several Twilio contents that were improved and repurposed.

Repurposing existing content was a strategic move, saving time and resources.

The newly identified buyer personas optimized Twilio’s content strategy to resonate with the decision-makers.

Campaign Results:

  • Cut content production time by 40%
  • Launched new persona in under 90 days
  • Quickly and affordably revamped existing content
  • Established a sustainable customer engagement strategy
  • Content alone isn’t enough for desired outcomes.
  • Right buyer personas are critical for guiding content production and distribution.
  • Existing personas may become outdated with new products or services.
  • Researching new audiences is vital to identify fresh buyer personas.

#3 Skytap Case Study

customer persona case study

Skytap is a company operating in the cloud computing sector.

Their main challenge was not fully understanding their audience.

They recognized the need for “great content” in content marketing, but also realized that understanding what “great” means to their audience was crucial.

The company had initially identified their audience, but this was not sufficient.

They embarked on a deeper investigation to refine their buyer personas and identify the key decision-makers for their products.

Data collection was extensive, encompassing:

  • CRM and lead-tracking data
  • Search and other behavioral data
  • Input from sales representatives
  • Dialogues with existing customers

The effectiveness of engaging customers and asking targeted questions to enhance buyer personas was reaffirmed .

This approach allowed the team to identify the exact decision-makers for their marketing efforts.

With a clear understanding of their target audience, Skytap began constructing detailed buyer personas.

In a Marketing Sherpa interview , Skytap’s Marketing Director Nate Odell emphasized that developing buyer personas is a continual process.

He cautioned against trying to “understand everybody,” which can lead to overwhelming and unmanageable tasks.

Instead, their focus is on methodically targeting personas they frequently encounter in business dealings.

This strategic approach led to Skytap’s confidence in their ability to successfully engage similar prospects in other organizations, with a success rate of “90-95%,” as stated by Odell.

Such is the impact of creating precise and useful buyer personas that truly reflect the ideal customer.

  • Rather than relying on a vague notion of “great content,” the company chose to study their audience and customers to understand what great content truly means to them.
  • Continuously creating and refining buyer personas is an essential, ongoing process for the company.
  • Understanding who the decision-makers are significantly increases the success rate.

#4 Genesis Systems Group Case Study

customer persona case study

Genesis Systems , a leader in robotic systems integration , collaborated with Amplify, a marketing agency specializing in industrial marketing and guidance.

Amplify’s first move was recognizing the need for new buyer personas , a key element for all subsequent strategies.

To develop these personas, they employed two methods:

  • Analyzing historical data
  • Utilizing surveys completed by marketing and sales staff

This highlights the value of insights from those in direct contact with customers .

The newly crafted buyer personas were shared across both organizations, ensuring alignment and consistency in their approach.

This demonstrates the unifying effect of buyer personas in collaborative settings where multiple teams must work in harmony.

The campaign’s outcomes, as detailed by Amplify , were significant:

  • Buyer personas became the backbone for planning and executing the campaign.
  • They highlighted key issues in the previous strategy, paving the way for a more effective approach.
  • They transformed Genesis into a more customer-focused company.
  • There was an exponential increase in lead generation .
  • Buyer personas were crucial to the success of their content marketing campaign .
  • They informed decisions that led Genesis to become more consumer-centric – a core principle of content marketing.
  • The company relied on historical data and staff surveys to gain valuable customer insights for persona development.
  • Buyer personas streamlined the content marketing strategy , providing clear direction and preventing misaligned efforts.

7 Buyer Persona Generators – Which One is the Best in 2024?

Mission statement vs vision statement: key differences, examples, and analysis.

How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [+Free Persona Template]

Learn how to create buyer personas for your business with the help of this research guide and persona template.

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BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATES

Easily organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger

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Updated: 12/05/23

Published: 12/05/23

As marketers, we know that marketing according to data points alone isn’t enough to get meaningful engagement for your business—that’s the job of a buyer persona.

Download Our Free Buyer Persona Guide + Templates 

And, while demographic survey results are great, there are many factors of customer behavior that are needed to create a well-rounded and detailed buyer persona.

Combining different research methods to form a detailed buyer persona is my shining recommendation, and in this post, I’ll show you a research-driven method for creating buyer personas. With just a few thoughtful steps, you’ll walk away with consumer stories and profiles that represent your customer base.

Why Are Buyer Personas So Important?

Different Types of Buyer Personas

How to Create Buyer Personas

How to Find Interviewees for Researching Personas

Buyer Persona Examples

According to our research , most marketers lack crucial information about their audience, so they struggle to make personalized content.

buyer characteristic research

Before diving into the buyer persona creation process, let’s pause to understand the impact of well-developed buyer personas on your business (specifically, your marketing efforts).

Why are buyer personas important to your business?

1. Buyer personas help you personalize your marketing.

Personalization is the main reason buyer personas are essential, and it’s only possible when you truly understand your audience. Customers appreciate personalization, as 96% of marketers say it increases the likelihood of buyers becoming repeat customers and 94% say it increases sales.

graphic displaying the importance of personalization to driving sales

I don’t know about you, but those stats definitely represent my experience as a consumer. I’m more likely to be a fan of and give repeat business to brands that know what I like and cater to my interests. For example, a brand that sends me an email to tell me that a product on my wishlist is on sale will, more likely than not, turn me into a loyal and repeat customer who even promotes them to my friends.

2. Buyer personas inform product development.

Extensive research into your target customer doesn't only help your marketing functions — these insights have a place in the research and development phase of your product development process.

Understanding what your ideal customer experiences on a day-to-day basis can inspire innovative improvements to your product.

Say, for example, you run a company that sells kitchen utensils and your buyer persona research tells you that your ideal customer lives in the South where grilling is common throughout the year. This could present an opportunity to develop and offer grilling utensils or improve your kitchen utensils so that they work in both indoor and outdoor cooking environments.

3. Buyer personas enable the optimization of demand generation, lead generation, and lead nurturing content.

Do you know your buyer persona wants to hear from you? One way to find out is through buyer persona research. Understanding how your ideal customer prefers to receive communication can influence your demand generation strategies.

For example, a preference for SMS communication among your target audience can mean you create SMS lead nurturing campaigns instead of emails. You can even justify website changes based on the data you discover from your research.

4. Buyer personas help you tailor your product's messaging its target audience.

Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, making it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet your target audience's specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.

For example, you may know your target buyers are caregivers, but do you know the type of care they provide most often? What is the typical background of your ideal buyer? To fully understand what makes your best customers tick, developing detailed personas for your business is critical.

Case in point: marketers who offer customers a personalized experience are 215% more likely to say their marketing strategies are effective than those who don’t.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research and insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). The most common information marketers gather from their audiences is about their interests and hobbies, basic demographic information, and products they’re potentially interested in buying.

information marketers have

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10 or 20. But if you’re new to personas, start small. You can always develop more personas later if you need them.

What is a negative buyer persona?

While a buyer persona represents your ideal customer, a negative—or exclusionary—persona represents who you don’t want as a customer.

For example, this could include professionals who are too advanced for your product or service, students who only engage with your content for research/ knowledge, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire.

The potential customers may be too expensive because of a low average sale price, their propensity to churn, or their unlikeliness to purchase again from your company. This knowledge is valuable because it helps you narrow down your strategic execution so that your inputs directly contribute to your results.

How can buyer personas be used in marketing?

At the most basic level, developing personas allows you to create content and messaging that appeals to your target audience. It also enables you to target or personalize your marketing to different audience segments.

For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging to what you know about those different personas.

Furthermore, when combined with lifecycle stage (i.e., how far along someone is in your sales cycle), buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content. (You can learn more about how to do that by downloading our Content Mapping Template .)

And if you take the time to also create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of segmenting out the "bad apples” from the rest of your contacts. This can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer and, therefore, increase sales productivity.

Buyer personas are also an excellent tool if you target a niche audience. I run Breaking the Blueprint , a blog column for minority business owners and entrepreneurs, and the target audience is more specific and granular than that of the general HubSpot Blog (Black entrepreneurs vs. entrepreneurs as a whole, for example).

Sure, I could publish posts based on what I think my target audience would look for and benefit from, but I can create much better content that actually makes an impact and better serves them if I hear from them about their specific interests, needs, and pain points.

customer persona case study

Buyer Persona Templates

Organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger.

  • Learn about personas.
  • Conduct persona research.
  • Create targetted content.
  • Build your own personas.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Free Buyer Persona Templates

Fill out the form if you want the free kit., types of buyer personas.

While developing your personas, you may ask yourself, "What are the different types of buyer personas?" From there, it'd be simple to adjust one for your business — right?

Well, that's not exactly how it works. Yes, there are standard buyer personas for common demographics, like age groups. Let’s go over some basic examples using data from our State of Consumer Trends Report .

Here are some key stats about Gen Z:

  • 64% of Gen Z have discovered a product on social media in the past three months.
  • Recommendations from influencers have a stronger impact than those from friends and family.
  • Gen Z cares, more than any other generation, that brands stake a stance on social issues, especially about racial justice (47%), LGBTQ+ rights (46%), and climate change (41%).
  • Gen Z likes to gather information themselves when researching a product or service (64%)
  • Gen Z’s favorite form of content is short-form video. (61%)

Based on their overwhelming desire for brands to take a stand on social issues, I’ll call this example buyer persona Socially Conscious Sam. Here’s how I’d use those stats to create a basic marketing buyer persona based on what she likes and how she wants information.

  • Sam spends a lot of time on social media, and it’s where she wants to discover new products or services.
  • She’d prefer to research a brand on her own instead of talking to someone from a business, and she’d most likely look for this information on social media.
  • She wants to see engaging short-form videos that showcase your brand, especially TikToks and Instagram Reels.
  • Sam trusts the influencers and creators that she follows, and the product recommendations and endorsements that they give are a strong influence when she buys products.
  • It’s extremely important to Sam that the brands she supports stake a stand on the social issues she cares about, and she wants to know about the causes they support.

Here are some key stats about Gen X.

  • Gen X prefers discovering new products on social media and surfing the internet.
  • Gen X enjoys and engages the most with images/photos/infographics.
  • Overall, Gen X prefers to purchase products from online retailers that sell a variety of brands.
  • The quality of a product has the highest influence on Gen X's decision to make a purchase.
  • Gen X doesn’t think companies should take a stance on social issues.

I’ll call this person Techy Ted, as he does most of his shopping online. Here’s how I’d turn that research of his preferences into a basic persona.

  • Ted prefers to discover new products online through social media and browsing the internet.
  • Visually appealing images, photos, and infographics capture his attention, and he spends the most time engaging with them.
  • Ted likes the ease of buying from an online retailer (like Amazon) that features a variety of products from different brands.
  • Ted values the quality of his products over all else, and he wants access to detailed information about features and benefits. Marketing messages that emphasize this are the most helpful.
  • He prefers brand-specific content and doesn’t think his favorite businesses need to take a stance on social issues.

Even with these standard profiles, there is still variation. For example, my mom's generation overwhelmingly prefers images, photos, and infographics, but she loves Instagram Reels more than anyone I know.

Because of this, there isn’t a set of universally recognized buyer personas to choose from, nor is there a standard for the number of personas you need. Every business (no matter how many competitors they have) is unique, so their buyer personas should be unique to them, too.

That’s why identifying and creating your different buyer personas can, at times, be slightly challenging. This is why I recommend using HubSpot's Make My Persona generator (as well as HubSpot's persona templates ) to simplify the process of creating different personas.

HubSpot's Make My Persona Tool

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Just like buyer personas are unique to each company, so is their name for them. You may see buyer personas referred to as “customer personas," "marketing personas," "audience personas," or "target persona.” Each carries the same meaning but will look unique within your company.

Companies may generally have the same (or similar) categories for their buyer personas (e.g., a marketer, an HR rep, an IT manager, etc.). But your business’ personas and the amount you need will depend on your target audience and what you offer your customers.

What goes into persona development?

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of buyer personas and the different types, let’s explore the nuances of developing your buyer personas.

Before you begin creating your buyer personas, you need to identify the people on your team who will have a role in development. Every team has unique experiences with customers that will serve as valuable information for understanding your target audience.

I recommend you involve any customer-facing team member in the process. If you have too many cooks in the kitchen, you can choose one representative from each group or relevant department.

A great place to start is sales and marketing. Sales employees directly communicate with customers, and marketing staff can create data based on information about your customers. Your persona development team should also include an executive leader who will ensure your brand mission and values are upheld through every step of development.

What type of business needs to create buyer personas?

With all that we’ve covered, you might be wondering what types of businesses need to create buyer personas.

The answer is all of them. Every business needs customers or clients, and as long as this is true, buyer personas should be a staple in every business, regardless of the industry.

While developing buyer personas is crucial, reviewing and updating them regularly is equally important. I’d recommend doing this annually. I know this sounds tedious, but staying on top of your target audience and how their preferences may evolve ensures you’re always ready to meet their needs and helps you secure them as future repeat customers.

Do you feel ready to start creating your buyer personas? Let's dive in.

How to Create a Buyer Persona In 4 Steps

You can create buyer personas through research, surveys, and interviews — all with a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience.

While creating personas for Breaking the Blueprint, I discovered some helpful and practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas (you can also further your knowledge on this topic through the free HubSpot Academy course):

  • Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
  • Use form fields that capture important persona information when creating forms to use on your website . For example, if all of my personas vary based on company size, I'd ask each lead for information about company size in the forms.
  • Consider your sales team's feedback on the leads they interact with most. What generalizations can you make about the different types of customers you serve best?
  • Interview customers and prospects to discover what they like about your product or service.

Now, how can you use the above research to create your personas?

Once you've gone through the research process, you'll have a lot of meaty, raw data about your potential and current customers. But what do you do with it? How do you distill all of it so it's easy for everyone to understand all the information you've gathered?

The next step is to use your research to identify patterns and commonalities from the answers to your interview questions, develop at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the rest of the company.

buyer-persona-research_8

You can use our free, downloadable persona template to organize the information you've gathered about your persona(s) and share it with relevant stakeholders so everyone can develop an in-depth understanding of the people they’re targeting at work.

Let’s work through the steps involved in creating a buyer persona in more detail.

1. Fill in your persona's basic demographic information.

Ask demographic-based questions over the phone, in person, or with online surveys. Keep in mind that some people are more comfortable disclosing personal information in private, or some might not want to at all, so it’s a best practice to make this optional unless it’s a pivotal part of your buyer persona.

If you're having conversations, I find it helpful to include descriptive buzzwords and mannerisms of your persona you may pick up on to make it easier for people on your team to identify certain personas when talking to prospects.

buyer-persona-templates

Download this Template

2. Share what you've learned about your persona's motivations.

This is where you'll distill the information you learned from asking "why" during those interviews. What keeps your persona up at night? Who do they want to be? Most importantly, tie that all together by telling people how your company can help them.

buyer persona motivations

3. Help your sales team prepare for conversations with your persona.

The personas I’ve created are more helpful and impactful when I include real quotes from interviews that exemplify what my audience is concerned about, who they are, and what they want.

You can also create a list of the objections they might raise so your sales team can prepare to address those during conversations with prospects.

buyer persona research

4. Craft messaging for your persona.

Tell people how to talk about your products/ services with your persona. This includes the nitty-gritty vocabulary you should use and a more general elevator pitch that positions your solution in a way that resonates with your persona.

This will help you ensure everyone in your company speaks the same language when conversing with leads and customers.

buyer persona messaging

Finally, make sure you give your persona a name (e.g., Finance Manager Margie, IT Ian, or Landscaper Larry), so everyone internally refers to each persona the same way, allowing for cross-team consistency.

And if you're a HubSpot customer, you can easily add your persona to Marketing Hub by following this step-by-step setup guide .

How to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas

One of the most critical steps to establishing your buyer persona(s) is finding people to speak with to understand, well, who your buyer persona is.

But how do you find these interviewees? There are a few sources you can tap into.

1. Use your current customers.

Your existing customer base is the perfect place to start your interviews because they've already purchased your product and engaged with your company. At least some of them are likely to exemplify your target persona(s).

Don't just talk to people who love your product and want to spend an hour gushing about you (as good as that feels). Customers who are unhappy with your product will show other patterns that will help you form a solid understanding of your personas.

For example, you might find that some of your less happy customers have bigger teams and need greater collaboration functionality from your product. Or, you may find they find your product too technical and difficult to use. In both cases, you learn something about your product and what your customers' challenges are.

Another benefit of interviewing current customers is that you may not need to offer them an incentive (e.g., gift cards). Customers like being heard, and interviewing them gives them a chance to tell you about their world, their challenges, and what they think of your product.

Customers also like to have an impact on the products they use. So, as you involve them in interviews like this, you may find they become even more loyal to your company. When you reach out to customers, be clear that your goal is to get their feedback and that you highly value it.

2. Use your prospects.

You can also interview people who have not purchased your product and know little about your brand. Your prospects and leads are great options because you already have their contact information.

Use the data you do have about them (i.e., anything you've collected through lead generation forms or website analytics) to figure out who might fit into your target personas. Tools like Enlyft can help you create custom buyer persona profiles and match your prospects to them to make it easier to find the people you need to talk to.

3. Use your referrals.

You might need to rely on referrals to talk to people who may fit into your target personas, particularly if you're heading into new markets or don't have any leads or customers yet.

Use your network (coworkers, existing customers, social media contacts, etc.) to find people you'd like to interview and be introduced to. Getting a large volume of people with this method can be tough, but you'll likely get some very high-quality interviews out of it.

If you don't know where to start, I suggest searching on LinkedIn for people who may fit into your target personas and seeing who you share connections with, and reaching out to them for introductions.

4. Use third-party networks.

For interviewees completely removed from your company, you can recruit from third-party networks. For example, Craigslist lets you post ads for people interested in any job, and UserTesting.com lets you to run remote user testing.

You'll have less control over sessions run through UserTesting.com, but it's a great resource for quick user testing recruiting.

Now that you know how to find interviewees, I'll go over some tips for recruiting them.

Tips for Recruiting Buyer Persona Interviewees

As you reach out to potential buyer persona interviewees, here are a few ideas to improve your response rates.

1. Use incentives.

Incentives give people a reason to participate if they don’t already have a relationship with you. You probably don’t need them in every scenario (e.g., customers who already want to talk to you), but a simple gift card is an easy option.

2. Be clear that this isn't a sales call.

Be clear that you’re not making a sales call. This is especially important when dealing with non-customers who might be wary of getting stuck on a sales call. Explain that you’re doing research and want to learn from them, not committing them to a sales call. You're getting them to commit to telling you about their lives, jobs, and challenges.

3. Make it easy to say yes.

Take care of everything for your potential interviewee. Suggest times, but be flexible so they can pick what works best for them.

4. Decide how many people you need to interview.

How many people do you need to interview to create a well-rounded persona?

I wish I could give you a set number, but my answer is that it depends. Start with at least three to five interviews for each persona you create. That may be enough if you already know a lot about your persona.

You may need multiple interviews with each category of interviewees (customers, prospects, people who don’t know your company). You’ll naturally notice patterns throughout your conversations, but a good rule of thumb is to call it if you start predicting what they’ll say.

5. Determine which questions you'll ask interviewees.

It's time to conduct the interview! After the normal small talk and thank yous, it's time to jump into your questions. You’ll want to ask several categories of questions during persona interviews to create a complete persona profile, from personal background questions, to questions about goals and challenges in their current role.

Let's go over some examples of completed buyer personas to get a better understanding of what they look like.

B2B Buyer Persona Example

The image below is a B2B buyer persona for someone who works in HR. The persona paints a clear picture of the target customer's struggles and how the business can best meet those needs. In this case, HR recruiting tools streamline processes, make recruiting easier, and help HR expertly manage their overall job duties.

b2b buyer persona example

B2C Buyer Persona Example

The image below is a B2C buyer persona for a music streaming service.

buyer persona examples: b2c buyer persona

Based on this persona, a streaming service would want to ensure that it has a user-friendly mobile app, sends new music notifications, and makes it easy for users to discover new music related to their interests and share content with friends.

Create Your Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas helps you understand your target customers on a deeper level and ensures everyone on your team knows how to best target, support, and work with your customers. When you use your personas to guide decisions, I don’t doubt that you’ll see improvement in your reach, boost your conversions, and increase customer loyalty.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Blog - Buyer Persona Template [Updated]

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Customer Personas

Executive summary.

Andrew Reise crafted in-depth customer personas, unearthed customer pain points across the omnichannel experience, and identified high-return opportunities for a more than 100-year-old footwear retailer. The project used stakeholder and customer interviews along with research into customer shopping and buying trends to assemble an enterprise voice of the customer (VoC) roadmap. By creating thorough customer personas, we were able to help our client identify customer pain points, urgent needs, and opportunities to boost customer loyalty. Ultimately, the client came away with a full set of personas and a plan to leverage them to drive higher retention and growth.

Business Challenge

Especially in the retail space, consumer behaviors are shifting. As customers adopt a new mix of online and in-store shopping, their needs and preferences are morphing. Companies must dig deep into the current customer experience to identify the best path toward growth. Without thorough personas and a strong voice of the customer roadmap, it’s easy for organizations to lose touch with customer experiences—and thus miss the chance to drive deeper customer loyalty. Our client needed to reset its customer experience (CX) plan, better understand current shoppers’ behaviors, and carve out a clearer picture of its customers’ wants, needs, friction points, and expectations. Although the client had a surface-level understanding of its customers, it wanted to dive deeper into customer experiences and shed light on opportunities to improve those experiences in the current retail environment. Every second the client operated without in-depth personas, it was missing out on new opportunities to build meaningful customer relationships, widen its customer base, and accelerate growth.

How Andrew Reise Helped

We started by conducting nearly a dozen stakeholder interviews and workshops to see how company leaders viewed their customer journey and friction points. Next, we used interviews and web surveys to gather extensive data about customer experiences across all of our client’s customer interaction points. From there, we created personas, analyzed the voice of the customer, built a voice of the customer inventory list, and identified what actions to prioritize in order to drive different company goals.

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Using Customer Persona Development to Upgrade the Customer Experience and Unveil New Growth Opportunities

Developing customer personas and analyzing the voice of the customer.

After conducting in-depth primary and secondary interviews, we designed full-scale personas to help our client understand and visualize the customer experience. These customer representations allowed our client’s teams to empathize with potential and current customers, identify fractured experiences, and find the biggest opportunities to deepen their relationships. 

Uncover Consumer Shopping and Buying Trends

We used customer persona research to zero in on current shopping habits and buying patterns for our client’s target customers. These insights revealed the best ways to reach these consumers and elevate the customer experience.

Plotting and Prioritizing Voice of the Customer Needs

Through customer persona development, we analyzed friction points across both digital and brick-and-mortar shopping experiences. Next, we measured the gaps in the customer’s experience, developed a full voice of the customer map, and laid out a prioritization list to identify the most immediate and high-impact changes our client could implant into the customer experience.

We Speak Customer

It’s a language we know very well. We’re Andrew Reise, a recognized global thought leader that specializes in improving both sides of the company/customer relationship. Our unique approach consists of our own methodology and a group of distinctly selected consultants who are all veterans in customer experience. Our process is proven, and our people boast a “do it all” no-nonsense approach and are empowered to do the right thing—even if that means going above and beyond the original scope of work.  

Read Our Latest Experience Insights

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Case Studies: Effective Customer Persona Applications

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Case studies are an effective way to understand how customer personas can be applied in a real-world setting. They provide a detailed look at how a company has used customer personas to improve their marketing and customer service strategies. By examining the successes and failures of a company’s customer persona application, other businesses can learn from their experiences and apply the same strategies to their own customer base. This article will provide an overview of the benefits of using customer personas and how to create effective case studies to illustrate their application.

How to Create an Effective Customer Persona for Your Case Study

Creating an effective customer persona for your case study is essential for understanding your target audience and crafting a successful marketing strategy. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

When creating a customer persona, you should focus on the customer’s goals, challenges, and needs. This will help you better understand their motivations and how they interact with your product or service.

Here are some tips for creating an effective customer persona for your case study:

1. Start with market research.

Before you create a customer persona, you should conduct market research to gain insights into your target audience. This can include surveys, interviews, and focus groups. This will help you understand who your ideal customer is and what they need from your product or service.

2. Create a detailed profile.

Once you have gathered the necessary data, you can start creating a detailed profile of your ideal customer. This should include demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, as well as psychographic information, such as interests, values, and lifestyle.

3. Identify goals and challenges.

Your customer persona should also include information about the customer’s goals and challenges. This will help you understand their motivations and how they interact with your product or service.

4. Use real data.

When creating your customer persona, it’s important to use real data from your existing customers. This will help you create a more accurate representation of your ideal customer.

Creating an effective customer persona for your case study is essential for understanding your target audience and crafting a successful marketing strategy. By following these tips, you can create a detailed profile of your ideal customer that will help you better understand their needs and motivations.

Leveraging Customer Personas to Improve Your Case Study Results

Are you looking for ways to improve your case study results? If so, customer personas can be a great tool to help you get there.

Customer personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customers. They help you understand who your customers are, what their needs and wants are, and how they interact with your product or service. By creating customer personas, you can better target your case studies to the right audience and get more effective results.

So, how do you create customer personas? Start by gathering data about your customers. This can include demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, as well as psychographic information, such as interests, values, and lifestyle. You can also look at customer feedback and surveys to get a better understanding of their needs and wants.

Once you have the data, you can start to create your customer personas. Start by giving each persona a name and a photo. Then, fill in the details about their demographic and psychographic information. You can also include information about their goals, challenges, and how they interact with your product or service.

Once you have your customer personas created, you can use them to create more effective case studies. For example, if you have a customer persona that is a young professional, you can create a case study that focuses on how your product or service can help them achieve their goals. Or, if you have a customer persona that is a stay-at-home mom, you can create a case study that focuses on how your product or service can make her life easier.

By leveraging customer personas, you can create more targeted case studies that will resonate with your target audience and get better results. So, if you’re looking to improve your case study results, customer personas can be a great tool to help you get there.

Analyzing the Impact of Customer Personas on Your Case Study Outcomes

If you’re looking to get the most out of your case study, you should consider incorporating customer personas into your research. Customer personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customer, based on market research and customer data. By understanding who your customers are, you can tailor your case study to their needs and interests, resulting in more effective outcomes.

Creating customer personas can be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth the effort. By understanding your customer’s motivations, goals, and challenges, you can craft a case study that speaks directly to them. This will help you create a more compelling narrative and make your case study more effective.

When creating customer personas, it’s important to consider the demographics of your target audience. This includes age, gender, location, and income level. You should also consider their interests, values, and lifestyle. This will help you create a more detailed picture of your ideal customer and tailor your case study to their needs.

Once you’ve created your customer personas, you can use them to inform your case study. For example, you can use the customer personas to determine which topics to focus on in your case study. You can also use them to determine which types of visuals and language to use to make your case study more engaging.

By incorporating customer personas into your case study, you can ensure that your research is more targeted and effective. This will help you create a more compelling narrative and make your case study more successful. So, if you’re looking to get the most out of your case study, consider incorporating customer personas into your research.

Crafting a Winning Customer Persona Strategy for Your Case Study

Are you looking to create a winning customer persona strategy for your case study? If so, you’ve come to the right place! Crafting a customer persona strategy is essential for any business, as it helps you better understand your target audience and create content that resonates with them.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the importance of customer personas and how to create a winning customer persona strategy for your case study. Let’s get started!

What is a Customer Persona?

A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s based on market research and real data about your existing customers. A customer persona helps you understand your target audience on a deeper level, so you can create content and campaigns that are tailored to their needs and interests.

Why is a Customer Persona Strategy Important?

A customer persona strategy is important because it helps you create content and campaigns that are tailored to your target audience. By understanding your customer’s needs, interests, and pain points, you can create content that resonates with them and drives conversions.

Creating a Winning Customer Persona Strategy for Your Case Study

Now that you understand the importance of customer personas, let’s discuss how to create a winning customer persona strategy for your case study. Here are the steps you should follow:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in creating a customer persona strategy is to identify your target audience. Think about who your ideal customer is and what their needs and interests are.

2. Gather Data

Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to gather data. You can use surveys, interviews, and other research methods to learn more about your target audience.

3. Analyze the Data

Once you’ve gathered the data, it’s time to analyze it. Look for patterns and insights that can help you create a customer persona that accurately represents your target audience.

4. Create Your Customer Persona

Now it’s time to create your customer persona. Use the data you’ve gathered to create a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.

5. Test and Refine

Once you’ve created your customer persona, it’s time to test and refine it. Use A/B testing and other methods to make sure your customer persona is accurate and effective.

Creating a winning customer persona strategy for your case study is essential for any business. By understanding your target audience on a deeper level, you can create content and campaigns that are tailored to their needs and interests. Follow the steps outlined in this blog post to create a customer persona strategy that will help you drive conversions and grow your business.

Best Practices for Applying Customer Personas to Your Case Study

When it comes to creating a case study, customer personas can be a great way to make sure you’re telling the right story. By understanding the needs and motivations of your target audience, you can craft a case study that resonates with them and helps them make an informed decision. Here are some best practices for applying customer personas to your case study.

1. Start with Research: Before you start writing your case study, it’s important to do some research into your target audience. This will help you create customer personas that accurately reflect the needs and motivations of your target audience.

2. Create Detailed Personas: Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to create detailed customer personas. Make sure to include information such as age, gender, job title, interests, and goals. This will help you create a case study that speaks directly to your target audience.

3. Use Personas Throughout the Case Study: Once you’ve created your customer personas, make sure to use them throughout the case study. This will help you create a story that resonates with your target audience and helps them make an informed decision.

4. Test Your Case Study: Once you’ve written your case study, it’s important to test it with your target audience. This will help you make sure that your case study is resonating with your target audience and that it’s helping them make an informed decision.

By following these best practices, you can make sure that your case study is resonating with your target audience and helping them make an informed decision. By understanding the needs and motivations of your target audience, you can create a case study that speaks directly to them and helps them make an informed decision.

1. What is a customer persona? A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of a customer based on market research and real data about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.

2. How can customer personas be used effectively? Customer personas can be used effectively to help businesses better understand their target audience and create more effective marketing strategies. Personas can also be used to inform product design and development, customer service, and other areas of the business.

3. What are the benefits of using customer personas? The benefits of using customer personas include gaining a better understanding of customer needs and preferences, creating more targeted and effective marketing campaigns, and improving customer service.

4. What are some best practices for creating customer personas? Some best practices for creating customer personas include conducting market research, gathering customer feedback, and creating detailed profiles for each persona. It is also important to regularly review and update customer personas as customer needs and preferences change over time.

5. How can case studies be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of customer personas? Case studies can be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of customer personas by showing how businesses have used personas to create more effective marketing campaigns, improve customer service, and develop better products. Case studies can also provide insights into how customer personas can be used to inform business decisions.

Case studies are an effective way to apply customer personas to a business. By understanding the needs and wants of a customer, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns that are tailored to the customer’s needs. This can help businesses increase their customer base and improve customer loyalty. Additionally, case studies can provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be used to inform future marketing strategies. Ultimately, case studies are a powerful tool for businesses to use to better understand their customers and create more effective marketing campaigns.

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How to Build Customer Personas: The Complete Guide

Customer personas help in delivering a great customer experience to increase conversion rate & achieve higher marketing roi.

  • What are customer personas?
  • Why are customer personas important?
  • Customer persona examples from real-life
  • How to create customer personas accurately
  • Customer persona interview questions templates
  • Steps to build a customer persona using a survey template
  • Using customer personas for improving marketing performance
  • Learn customer motivations, desires, & concerns through personas
  • 11 Real Life Examples of Customer Journey Maps
  • Customer Journey Map Template Download

We have the world’s most versatile user research & feedback survey tool starting at $0

Targeting customers accurately is no walk in the park, especially in these days of heightened competition. It takes keen business acumen to attract and convince the right customer to adopt your product or service.

But how can you know which strategy will work?

This question is quite important for formulating a winning strategy because you are not your user. Yet, you have to make strategic decisions that (you believe) will ultimately benefit them.

The solution lies in building customer personas . They allow your teams to know your customers on a deeper level, which helps improve conversion rates.

In this guide, you'll learn about how to achieve this and what tools are at your disposal to create customer personas accurately so that all your processes, from product development to mass marketing and targeted advertising to customer support and after-sales service, perform better.

  • Verify moments of truth (more about them further below),
  • Segment the user experience into touchpoints or events,
  • Increase overall empathy for your users, and
  • Serve as a great conversation starter that will jumpstart shared understanding in your organization.

What Are Customer Personas?

Personas are an important building block for successfully expanding your customer/user base.

Customer personas are representations of those people who can become long-term customers.

Think of the customer persona as a cheat sheet. A quick one-pager that you can use to fine-tune business decisions that impact customers. The best part is that a good customer persona will give you meaningful data about your target customers that you’ve been craving.

Composite sketch: Technically, customer personas are like a composite sketch that represents those key target demographic segments that make up the most lucrative customers of your product or service.

Audience segment: The persona is representative of a target market segment. For example, a target persona can be based on business size, or industry, or anything that’s important for your business.

Let’s begin the persona development process with a look at the significance of these personas.

There are many different ways to approach customer journey maps, as they should always be tailored to the goals of creating the map and the persona/use case whose experience they outline.

What Does a Customer Journey Map Look Like?

A customer journey map consolidates customer interactions at various stages of their journey into a time chart. Each map will differ depending on the scope of your experience mapping strategy. You can depict the complete journey from brand discovery to post-purchase interactions or choose to show a part of it, such as the checkout process or interaction with the support staff.

A typical customer journey map highlights the target customer persona, journey stages, touchpoints, interaction channels, customer emotions and their actions, and new opportunities at each touchpoint.

FutureCustomerJourneyMap

A significant advantage of customer journey mapping is; it streamlines task management across various teams by helping them identify their roles in enhancing the customer experience.

As you can see from the image above, different teams can utilize the map to optimize the customer experience, identify sales opportunities, and plan marketing campaigns across multiple channels to engage customers.

Why Do You Need a Customer Journey Map?

Let's take an example. Think of your business as a big stadium. There are many entry gates, just like different channels customers use to interact with you. At each gate, there are multiple interaction points or touchpoints, such as ticket counters, hot dog stands, washrooms, seats, etc.

To ensure smooth functioning of all the elements and provide the best experience to all the customers, you need coordinated planning. But the data points are scattered along numerous touchpoints.

What's more, since different teams handle different touchpoints, you can coordinate with each team individually. However, it becomes harder to collate the data of every team and present the customer experience as a continuous journey.

That is where the customer journey maps come into play.

They help you pick the scattered data and represent it as a time variable. This can help you:

  • Visualize the journey the customers take from one touchpoint to another as a continuous path instead of multiple individual interactions.
  • View how customers interact with each touchpoint.
  • Analyze their problems and issues with the stadium management and services.
  • >Identify new opportunities that can be explored to increase engagement and revenue

The same goes for any business, whether it is online, offline, or both. You can create customer journey maps to study customer experience at various stages.

How is customer journey mapping helpful?

  • You can see where the customer decides to switch channels in the journey, i.e., from desktop to mobile or website to app. What motivates them to do so?
  • At what point did they contact customer support, and what issue were they facing? Using this, you can implement standard measures at all touchpoints.
  • What are their emotions at various touchpoints? It will help to prioritize the negative ones.
  • Discover previously unknown interaction channels and touchpoints so you can optimize them.

Why Are Customer Personas Important?

Customer personas can help all your teams develop a shared understanding of the target consumer group and grasp their desires and behavioral patterns firmly, and as a result, make decisions strategically instead of just intuitively.

Check out these 33 mind-blowing stats about businesses that used customer personas!

Customer personas also help you minimize the risk of not understanding your target customers.

Difference Between Segments, Cohorts, and Personas?

While we’re on the topic, let’s see the differences between segments, cohorts, and personas.

Segments: The broadest categorical demarcation of customers. Basically, they could be huge if your target market is large (and hence unactionable) because they are based on generic factors like geographic, behavioral, or seasonal fluctuations in consumers’ preferences.

Cohorts: These are slightly more specific because they are groupings of customers based on their experiences (and therefore, their most likely preferences for products and services). Examples of such cohorts would be technologically adept millennials versus old-school baby boomers.

Personas: These are very particular (usually down to the individual level) representations that take into account the characteristics of the most lucrative kind of persons who have the highest chances of becoming valuable customers of your product or service. These are the ones we are creating.

What are negative buyer personas?

Basically, they are polar opposites of your ideal buyer persona. Odd though it may seem, any demographic segment that you would not like to sell your product or service to is represented by the negative customer persona.

These include prospects that were a part of the sales process almost till the end but didn’t close, red flags shown by problematic clients during the sales process but not caught, clients that were not profitable for your business for any reason and more.

Creating such a persona is important as it lets you focus on better quality leads that are part of your original buyer persona. This also helps streamline the marketing strategy and messaging.

Bonus Read: 11 SaaS Marketing Strategies & Techniques

Customer Persona Examples From Real-Life

Qualaroo's guide to collecting user feedback for digital products.

Here are a few examples of well-developed customer personas created by real-world entities.

  • Age 25/26 (median of 22 to 29) years; female
  • Active at least once a day on social media
  • Is in a new corporate job (hence has a disposable income)
  • Looks for early-bird discounts and prefers online purchases
  • Has previously attended Sunburn at least once
  • Makes group plans with friends
  • Likes meeting like-minded people
  • Age 29 years; male
  • Tunes in to at least one match per month, either on TV or app
  • Wants to attend a live match at the Old Trafford stadium
  • Has followed the team performance for at least a few years
  • Tries to play actual football with family/friends once a week
  • Participates in fantasy football team selector competitions
  • Talks with fellow supporters and family members about the team
  • Is loyal to a fault and hence, invaluable for positive word-of-mouth
  • Age 35 years; male
  • Makes holiday plans with wife or immediate family
  • Has traveled out of his/her native country at least once
  • I Want experiential tourism: hiking, glamping, safaris, etc.
  • Looks for world-class amenities during hotel stays
  • Does not like to go along a fixed itinerary

Modeling their ticketing offers, membership benefits, and marketing campaigns around such precise customer personas brings in more attendees, fans, and tourists for these businesses.

Case Studies: How Customer Personas Really Work

Here are a couple more examples of companies using customer personas to their benefit:

  • Tech starters - entrepreneurs (both startup as well as experienced)
  • Bright talents - college students (who may have part-time jobs)
  • City explorers - temporary visitors from out of the city/country

The company rewrote website content, remodeled marketing collateral, revamped out-of-home media, and updated its new employee training program to educate employees about the kinds of things these prospective customers sought, thus driving up its revenues.

  • Brightspark created a visual representation of their most-likely B2B buyer, as shown.

Brightspark.png

As these examples demonstrate, businesses that figure out how to build customer personas stand to profit from better ROI in their sales, marketing & advertising as well as other verticals.

The persona development process is about empathizing with your users , and most importantly, deepening your understanding of who your customers are, what they need, and how your organization can serve them.

If you’ve walked through a customer journey map exercise before, a lot of the same guidelines and benefits apply while figuring out how to build an accurate customer persona.

How to Create Customer Personas Accurately

A persona should be built on the basis of the following information:

  • Estimated income bracket
  • Family size
  • Personality type
  • Motivations
  • Job title and role level
  • Decision-making power
  • Tools used and budget for tools
  • Proximity to product or business objectives
  • A photo that represents your target user/customer
  • A fictional one-paragraph bio that tells their story
  • 1-2 quotes that reflect their desires
  • What publications, magazines, or journals they read
  • What blog posts or articles they read on your site
  • What trends or subcultures they may be part of

You can add (or subtract) other factors and methods depending on how deep you need your marketing personas to be. Also, like the negative buyer personas mentioned earlier, you might want to build different customer personas that let you identify how you deliver your sales pitch.

Examples of such personas are:

Detractors: For example, people in the decision-making process who might control the outcome of your B2B marketing

Influencers: For example, family members who may exercise the advantage of their purchasing power while making household purchases, etc.

Layering data or data overlapping: Once you have built your personas, you can validate (or invalidate) them using data-based research methods. One of the ways to do this is to check for overlapping data (called ‘layering’ the data) across your main customer segments to make sure that your persona covers the main characteristics that have a direct impact on the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

In the next section, we give two examples of question sets that can guide the creation of customer personas. The answers to these questions are part of qualitative research.

These questions are best used in focus groups, in-context free-from response analysis, and one-to-one existing customer interviews (preferably long-term customers).

On the other hand, if you are looking to base your customer personas on quantitative research, you are better off employing multiple-choice questionnaires (MCQs) with weighted answers.

Customer Persona Interview Questions Templates

Creating a persona is a means to an end. The end goal is to have an accurate representation of your target customer so that your marketing efforts can be effective. Using a readymade customer persona template is an efficient way to collect the information for this purpose.

[Template 1]

  • What is your role?
  • What does your typical day look like?
  • What did you come here to do today?
  • What problem does our product solve for you?
  • What do you want to achieve by using our product?
  • What tools are you using?
  • How has this feature impacted your work?
  • What is your biggest pain point?
  • What frustrates you?
  • What keeps you awake at night?
  • What is your biggest desire in relation to your problem?
  • How often do you encounter your problem?
  • What devices are you normally using when encountering this problem?
  • How is your success in your role measured?

[Template 2]

  • What frustrates you (during your work)?
  • What tools are you normally using when encountering that problem?

More Question Guides For You:

  • The Best Website Survey Questions & Examples
  • Product Feedback Survey Questions & Examples

Here's how you can develop accurate customer personas with Qualaroo

Steps to Build a Customer Persona Using a Survey Template

You can Create Customer Personas after you log in to Qualaroo by following these steps:

Step 1: Select ‘Create New’ on the top right of the dashboard, and on the next page, choose the type of Nudge you want to create:

Was the decision to create a customer journey map in response to a particular business need? If so, keep in mind the different types of customer journey maps and which one best fits this goal.

Now let’s have a look at a few use cases to get a better idea:

step-1 image

Step 2: Select one of the Build a Persona Templates from the list on the left.

step-2 image

We will continue with Template 1 to demonstrate how to create customer personas.

Step 3: Further settings can be adjusted while creating survey questions to build personas, depending upon how you plan to analyze the feedback, including:

  • Targeting a Nudge
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Answer type

step-3 image

Case in point: Enabling Sentiment Analysis gives you the gist of the feedback from freeform responses without you having to sift through all the customers’ answers individually.

step-3 image

Step 4: The next step is Targeting , wherein you set the parameters of Where, Who, When, How Often, and How Long:

step-4 image

The target demographic could be all (100%) visitors or certain visitors who match your criteria of behavior, technology, and more factors, and the timing to display the Nudge can be preset as well:

step-4 image

Step 5: Next step is designing your Nudge TM , which includes deciding the look and feel of how the survey question for building a customer persona will appear to users, including the option to use your own logo.

If you want to tweak the look and feel of your Nudge TM further, make full use of our Design API!

step-5 image

Step 6: Once you have set your background image and logo, you can -

  • save and activate the Nudge, or
  • save and customize it further, or
  • preview it on site before exercising any of these two options

step-6 image

And there you have it! A customer persona that truly personifies your target audience.

**Customer Personas Cheat Sheet**

Ace the art of creating personas that truly reflect your target user’s tastes.

As mentioned above, personas will contain a variety of details about your core customer or target user. To build an accurately informed and data-driven persona, you will want to include both quantitative and qualitative insights.

  • Learn how to build actionable personas to improve conversions:

1. Learn how to build actionable personas to improve conversions:

  • Check out the answers to these important questions about personas at a Qualaroo webinar, and ask your own in the comments!

2. Check out the answers to these important questions about personas at a Qualaroo webinar, and ask your own in the comments!

Q: When do you know how to add a new persona?

Q: Do you recommend doing persona research before market segmentation research, or vice-versa?

Q: What happens if your segmentation/persona data is not aligned with the story of your company?

Q: How often do you recommend updating your personas?

3. Once you have created the perfect persona, you need to target customers accordingly.

See how Qualaroo helps you create advanced targeting in just 42 seconds!

Using Customer Personas for Improving Marketing Performance

Customer personas play an important role in marketing activities at various stages. Right from the pitching to even customer relationship management, customer personas can help things move along your sales funnel and open new avenues. Here’s how:

  • Give your most-suited pitch to prospects

Knowing the kinds of customers who approach you (or who you approach from the leads you generate) lets you tailor your sales pitch. Customer personas make sure that your sales agents and customer-facing employees know what people are looking for in general right from the beginning of the interaction so that they can follow up with appropriate strategies and actions.

  • Improve customer relationship management

If you are running a fairly sizable business, you might be using a CRM tool . Integrate it with your customer personas so that you can classify the leads according to their (expected) desires. Doing this will make your sales team better prepared to handle prospects and improve conversion rates. This is especially true if you sell a variety of products/services in the market.

  • Streamline your inbound marketing funnels

We have mentioned before how millennials are more likely to be technologically adept while baby boomers might prefer outmoded channels of communication. Your customer personas will help you create more streamlined sales funnels that will guide each customer segment towards the final purchase level in the way that speaks most to them, increasing conversion probability.

Bonus Read: 45+ Best Lead Generation Tools & Software

  • Expand your target audience efficiently

Knowing which social media channels are used by your most lucrative customer segments will help you reach more prospects through your marketing activities. Given today’s digitally influenced market that thrives on social media influencers and YouTubers, your customer persona might even lead you to the perfect Instagram influencer or vlogger for your brand!

Learn Customer Motivations, Desires, & Concerns Through Personas

In this guide, we've covered how building accurate personas offers unique insights and helps us make better strategic decisions. By targeting your questions, saving time with templates, and properly analyzing the results of your efforts, your business can learn within weeks what sometimes takes companies years to learn.

With its unobtrusive Nudges TM , Qualaroo offers a unique advantage to anyone trying to build highly accurate customer personas quickly, with minimum hassle, using our survey template.

Reach out to us pronto if you'd like to learn more & level up your persona development process.

Want to know what your customers think?

Qualaroo is the world's top customer feedback tool

50+ buyer persona statistics that showcase their effectiveness

40+ buyer persona statistics that showcase adoption and effectiveness

Buyer personas play a crucial role in helping you develop a firm understanding of your customers. They not only help you achieve your business objectives but also allow users to get personalized experiences.

For those who don’t know, personas are fictional representations of your most ideal buyers.

They are based on a variety of factors that empower marketers to create effective marketing strategies and promote their products and services, both online and offline.

That said, personas are your best bet to boost sales and increase ROI. Discover the impact they have on companies using them with the 40+ buyer persona stats listed below.

Rise in interest and adoption of buyer personas

Many companies already use personas in their marketing campaigns, with many others recognizing their importance and moving in this direction.

After all, buyer personas are the new normal for individuals who want to expand their business and build a good rapport with their customers.

If you are still hesitant to adopt personas, the following stats will definitely convince you otherwise!

  • As per a study by ITSMA, 44% of marketers use buyer personas in their business, and an additional 29% will use them in the next 12 months.
  • 63% of content marketers actively create persona-centric content .
  • The search term "buyer persona" shows an upward growth in the Google Trends report, with current interests at an all-time high.

Boost company performance and sales revenue

High-performing companies regularly update, maintain, and encourage the use of customer personas within their organizations, which is critical since:

  • Customer centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are not customer centric.
  • Brands that use personalization reduce marketing and sales costs by 10-20%.
  • 71% of companies that surpass revenue targets have formally documented personas in place. In addition, they are 7x more likely to maintain updated personas.
  • High performing companies are also 2.4x more likely to use buyer personas for demand generation.
  • 24% of organizations generated more leads (with 56% producing higher-quality leads), and 36% created shorter sales cycles with buyer personas .
  • Three to four buyer personas account for over 90% of a company’s sales.
  • With personas, Thomson Reuters saw a 175% surge in marketing revenue , 10% uptick in leads sent to sales, and 72% reduction in lead conversion time.

Increase customer centricity and user engagement

Buyer personas play a big role in making a brand (and product) customer-centric and increasing user engagement.

While these stats are specific to a use case, here are some general buyer persona facts to give you a broader perspective.

  • 90% of companies that use buyer personas have been able to develop a better understanding of their consumers.
  • Customer personas have helped 82% of companies create an improved value proposition .
  • Persona-driven websites are 2-5x times more effective and easier to navigate by their targeted audiences.
  • 75% of B2B buyers say that the winning vendor’s content has a significant impact on their buying decisions.
  • Positive customer experiences yield 20% higher customer satisfaction rates and 10-15% boost in sales conversion rates.
  • High performing companies are ~2x times more likely to include the buying preferences of their customer personas, research their drivers and motivations, and understand their fears and challenges.
  • 48% of buyers are likely to choose solution providers who market to their specific needs.
  • Persona-based content further increased customer engagement by 6x when targeting cold leads.

Enhance marketing campaigns

Did you know that personas are one of the most popular criteria for segmenting content, with over 40% of B2B marketers segmenting content by buyer persona?

Marketing segmentation is typically based on demographics, psychographics, and behavior, used by marketers for content, emails, and ads (that are 2x more effective than other ads).

That’s not all.

  • Top-performing companies map more than 90% of their customer database using buyer personas.
  • In the B2B Content Marketing Report , 58% of marketers identify audience relevance as a crucial factor when evaluating the effectiveness of their content marketing campaigns.
  • Persona based email marketing increases click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%, driving 18x times more revenue than broadcast emails.

Use for personalization

Seventy percent of the decision-making process is completed by buyers using information found online – without ever engaging a sales representative.

Naturally, they will only choose companies that provide a good buyer experience. Hubspot’s marketing report says that personalization increases the chances of buyers becoming repeat customers.

So it is critical that brands personalize their digital content and customer journey.

Here are more insights into why personalization (with personas) goes a long way in acquiring new prospects and keeping the old ones.

  • 64% consumers expect personalized engagements based on past interactions.
  • As per an Epsilon research , 80% of buyers are more likely to purchase from a company that offers personalized experiences.
  • 77% of customers have selected, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides personalized experiences.
  • In fact, 84% of buyers say that customer experience is just as important as products and services.
  • On the other hand, 74% of users feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.
  • 63% of customers are more likely to engage and respond to personalized messaging than a one-size-fits-all communication strategy.

Case studies: Pega and Skytap

Over the years, many successful companies have employed persona-centric marketing strategies to generate revenue and expand their customer reach.

They have adopted buyer personas for various purposes, such as design, messaging, communication, product development, demand generation, and sales, deriving numerous benefits in the process.

Let us take a look at two of them, backing up our buyer persona statistics in the process.

Pega develops and refines its buyer personas in order to engage its users early in the customers’ journey.

With personas, the company further instills a sense of understanding between its sales, marketing, and product development teams.

Pega invested a considerable amount of time in examining user data, using both quantitative and qualitative methods for customer persona research – seeking third-party expertise to enhance the process.

The end results achieved were by no means ordinary.

  • Number of interactions with target accounts rose by 20%
  • Number of marketing generated leads into the pipeline increased by 10%
  • Number of opportunities in the pipeline and value of pipeline increased by 10%
  • Conversion rate of marketing generated leads to opportunities increased from 32% to more than 40%.
  • Number of marketing sourced opportunities in the active pipeline increased by 20%

Skytap is a self-service provider of cloud automation solutions.

As part of its content marketing campaign, the company aimed to create and convert more leads by analyzing both current and future prospects to build engaging content.

Although it required a significant investment of resources, Skytap saw immediate results after using personas in their content marketing plans.

An interview by Adam Sutton , featuring the company’s marketing strategy, reveals the following statistics:

  • Website traffic increased by 210%
  • Organic search traffic increased by 55%
  • The number of leads generated increased by 97% (online marketing)
  • Sales leads generated increased by 124% (both online and offline campaigns)
  • The number of opportunities generated by online marketing increased by 73%

Wrapping up

As demonstrated by the buyer persona statistics above, consistently using personas can really help business growth. They don’t just boost your profits but also elevate the customer experience.

Given their adoption rates, buyer personas can no longer be an afterthought for marketers. It has now become imperative for brands to use personas as a foundational piece of modern marketing.

So, whether you're selling the latest tech gadgets or offering yoga classes for millennials, mastering the art of creating, updating, and using buyer personas is essential.

Want a shortcut? Check out Persona by Delve AI !

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Customer Persona Best Practices + Template

Creating a customer persona can seem to be quite a challenging task. However, it turns out to be not that difficult once you understand the main purpose of using personas and what kind of data they should contain. And it’s even easier once you have a list of customer and user persona best practices and questions that show you precisely what you should pay attention to in order to create high-quality personas for your journey maps.

Now, that is exactly what we have to share with you today! The new persona template has a number of sections, each containing a list of questions. We have formulated the questions in a way that helps you generate insights for a specific part of your customer persona. Plus, each box also has a little tip on what to do or what to avoid to achieve the best result! Here is what Persona Best Practices look like:

UXPressia persona best practices

How to Use our Customer Persona Best Practices Template

You can either answer these questions one by one or skim them just to get the idea of what you are supposed to write in each particular section of your own user personas — it’s totally up to you. Just click anywhere on the section and start typing your answers instead of the questions listed in there.

Plus, there are a few useful tips that will trigger ‘aha’ moments while you are creating your customer persona.

Persona course

And the best part is you can use this template within our Personas Online tool . It allows you to build your personas in real-time collaboration with your teammates and supply them with all sorts of customer data, including demographics, market size, persona type, skills, the technology used, and many others. Once they are ready, you can present them side-by-side for comparison and export them into PNG, PPTX, or PDF.

Grab these user persona best practices tips and questions now and start creating insightful personas!

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How to create a customer journey map in e-commerce (+ free template)

Customer Personas: How to Activate for Success and Avoid Pitfalls

  • Published: May 9, 2023

“Know Thy Customer.”

This is a business’s mantra, our creed, our first commandment. It is practically tattooed on our hearts. So when your organization is granted budget for customer persona work, it feels like the chance of a lifetime. Finally , we think, we will have the insights we need to get the whole team focused on unlocking our market. 

It’s usually a marketing or product team that leads the charge on understanding customers and bringing those customers to life with personas. And personas are a great tool for both groups – but there is an opportunity to use customer personas across all customer-facing functional areas, and across the customer lifecycle to really drive strategic value. 

When personas become a priority initiative, there can be some real excitement about having a tool to really deliver customer value. And people should be excited! As long as everyone is on the same page.

Customer Personas: A Primer

Before we reveal the ins and outs of responsible persona use, let’s review just what they are.

Personas are simplified representations of your customers that you can leverage to develop and deploy effective, targeted products and services. Do you want to know what your customers are doing, thinking and feeling? These tools bring needs-based insights to life via profiles (complete with pictures) that are necessary for building empathy for your target customers and ultimately tailored growth strategies across your business.

Personas are based on prioritized needs and buying behaviors, enabling engagement at scale without having to resort to generic positioning (or endlessly customized products) to get there.

customer persona case study

For example: selecting a payment method when making purchases is a decision everyone makes daily. Consumers, businesses, governments – nearly all types of customers – are constantly determining how to pay for things.  And the choices are complex: Credit cards with points, fees, or interest rates; Cash – easy to understand, but can be lost, and involves physically managing it; ACH, checks, wire, and more choices are making themselves apparent every day; Virtual cards, cryptocurrencies, BNPL, short-term loans…the list goes on.

How does a business determine what motivates a customer to select different payment types, and then provide a message to that customer that conveys the value of their payment product? Does a customer value flexibility? Anonymous payments? Minimizing costs or even deriving revenue from payments? Making transactions easy? There are likely a few main decision drivers for customers, and there are likely a few core customer characteristics that can be grouped to form your dominant customer types.

Speaking to all these customers in equal measure and with the same message is not going to speak effectively to any of them. This is just one example where carefully developed customer personas can make a big difference.

Activating Personas for Success

When wielded responsibly, personas provide value to virtually every function of an organization.

If you did it right, you identified personas based on customer need and feedback – not just your company’s desires and internal assumptions. The best customer personas are built from the top down; they are built using first-person ethnography. The interviews you conduct and direct customer feedback you gather are made stronger by customer data.

So how do you activate these powerful tools to the greatest effect?

Success Factor #1: Educate stakeholders.

This is paramount. Without a fundamental understanding of what personas represent, it is incredibly easy for stakeholders to misuse them.

Lesson A: Customers within personas are not monolithic.

While the stock photo you choose to represent “Online Oliver” belongs to a certain demographic, this does not mean that all Online Oliver’s look or act exactly like him. On the whole, customers within a persona will show similar behaviors. It seems obvious, but it’s important to point out that there will be variations – and that personas are not necessarily demographic profiles.

Lesson B: Customers will move in and out of personas, may fall in between, or overlap a few.

Why? Because human beings are complex, and things change. This is where solid company data can really strengthen personas. A mobile provider may notice that many accounts have increased from one device to five. Have their customers grown their families? Do they use a variety of devices for different purposes? By incorporating data on actual buying behavior, you can see how personas are evolving, how customers in one persona progress into another, or even further segment personas to better deliver against their needs.

Lesson C: You should never use them to exclude customers.

Did you just roll your eyes a little? Again, this seems painfully obvious – but you’ll thank us when you’re in a meeting and someone says, “Our persona is Moms, we don’t talk to Dads.” We’ll come back to this.

Successful return on your persona investment begins with education and alignment. 

Success Factor #2: Separate users from influencers from decision-makers from payers.

These distinctions are crucial, and very difficult to see without the direct customer feedback and real-world observation that goes into persona development. For some products, the same individual may perform all of these roles. Lucky you! You have a single type of buyer to interview and understand.

But most of the time – particularly with high-stakes purchases like health care, but even with uncomplicated products like ketchup – there are multiple players at work from consideration to purchase.

Your users will prioritize different features from your payers or your researchers. They will consume different media, respond to different messages, and ultimately need different value delivered from you. With customer personas front and center throughout the organization, you can ensure their needs are consistently represented.

Success Factor #3: (Re)Prioritize investments based on customer needs.

A common misconception about customer personas is that they are “a marketing thing.” Clearly, customers are the reason companies exist, and matter to every part of an organization. But as most of us know, internal goals and insular perspectives can sometimes push customers out of focus, and lead to pet projects that are out of step with the ultimate goal of delivering customer (and therefore shareholder) value.

Personas, as easy-to-digest profiles of your customers and their needs, can be used cross-functionally to guide and justify changes in priorities. Imagine making business decisions backed by real customer data. While marketing and product groups tend to initiate persona projects (where their utility is obvious), leaders of all stripes can leverage them to rally support for customer-oriented product and service initiatives that may be less visible/popular or redirect funds and staff toward initiatives that better deliver against what your customers want.

A long-running product development effort that is mismatched with customer needs can lead to higher costs for less payoff in the long run. With widely adopted and well-understood personas, your company can avoid such “money pits” and put its assets to better use.

Avoiding Persona Pitfalls

So now you know a bit about what personas are and how to use them wisely. But how do you keep it that way? How do you prevent your investment in personas from being devalued? Keep an ear out for four common ways that personas go bad.

Pitfall #1: Never exclude customers based on targeted personas.

We mentioned this face-palmer before, but I’ve been in the rooms where it happened. Your personas, if done well, should target a large percentage of your customer population. If your value proposition or marketing messaging resounds with someone – no matter whom- you accommodate them.

Pitfall #2: Beware of oversimplification.

Sometimes organizations are so worried about losing potential customer types via personas that they insist their personas need to cover 100% of their customers. If your company is an industry giant, that’s likely to be everyone on the planet. We previously mentioned the danger of leaning on customer demographics rather than needs and buying behavior. I once witnessed a persona model based on age and binary gender. The same message was directed equally across each “persona,” even though the market was heavily weighted toward one group. By genericizing their personas, they left a lot of business on the table and wasted a lot of money.

Pitfall #3: Avoid quantitatively driven personas.

customer persona case study

People are not merely collections of data points. It bears repeating: the best customer personas begin with interviewing real customers. The worst personas begin with spreadsheets.

In another real-life example, a firm created personas based entirely on a (very time and money intensive) data modeling project. When Marketing Strategy asked “Can we see the dominant characteristics of each customer group?” the #2 characteristic was “mobile phone serial number.” This is a curiosity that could maybe be explained by something like “serial numbers are sequentially assigned, which correlates with older phones in service”, or “different manufacturers use different serial numbers,” but this was not true; this was a really random coincidence.  And it was used to identify and target customers for marketing offers. 

Starting with quantitative data is most likely to end in more data – not true insight.  By contrast, interviews often reveal insights and opportunities to harness quantitative data.

Pitfall #4: Don’t merely pay them lip service.

Again, a potential forehead-slapper, but I’ve seen it too many times. After all the effort you put into building personas, why let them collect dust? Personas are more than just pretty pictures, and not an end in themselves.  They make nice posters – but don’t forget to use them to win business.

The Bottom Line

Like many tools, personas can be used in lots of different ways. They can be a central platform to align and prioritize customer touchpoints across a business. And they can be a tactical exercise that can drive real results at smaller scales.

Whatever you do, don’t just create the personas for your business. Activate them.

Gavin Wassung contributed to this article.

Further Advisory helps companies across industries match the right customer experience strategies with the products and service offerings those companies provide. From customer personas to journeys to market analysis, we make strategy become a reality .

About the author

Sean Gilligan

Sean has spent his career focused on customer interactions – across sales, marketing, and customer service. In various engagements he has developed customer strategy, designed process, organization, and technology solutions to enable those strategies.

View all posts

Erin Catalina

Erin has over 15 years of progressive experience in digital marketing, combining brand strategy and both analytical and technical skills to drive measurable business results for a variety of Fortune 500 Retail, CPG, and B2B companies.

From Strategy to Reality®

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Using Personas to Better Understand Customers: USA.gov Case Study

customer persona case study

Personas are fictional characters that describe an organization’s customer behaviors, emotions, attributes, motivations, and goals. They are an important tool to share customer insights and understanding across an organization. Personas also serve as a check to make sure your organization’s actions meet the needs of the majority of customers, including visitors to your website, contact center, in-person visits, and interactive voice response (IVR) self service customers.

Why We Updated our Personas

Personas aren’t new to USA.gov . We developed personas several years ago because we recognized the importance of understanding our customers, their behaviors and information needs. As we’re evolving USA.gov and our contact center platforms, updated personas are important.

We created new personas (PDF, 1.9 MB, 5 pages) of the customers who currently use USA.gov and 1-844-USA-GOV1 based on the themes and insights observed from several different data sets. We reviewed the following 2014 data:

  • USA.gov Web analytics (via the Digital Analytics Program ), including demographics, devices, common paths, popular pages, and outbound links
  • Onsite search data from DigitalGov Search
  • USA.gov customer satisfaction survey data
  • Searches on Google that led customers to USA.gov (via Google Webmaster Tools )
  • 1-844-USA-GOV1 contact center content usage
  • Web analytics for other government websites available through the Digital Analytics Program
  • General search trends on Google

What We Learned

Our customers are diverse and come to USA.gov with a range of goals and to find a broad scope of information and services. We categorized them by type of information seeking behavior:

Complete a transaction (or find information to prepare to complete a transaction)

Find specific information on a known topic, browse information or learn more on a general topic, find contact information for an agency or elected official.

These categories aren’t perfect – there is overlap between the customer types. A customer may fall into multiple types, but we still think these personas are useful for thinking about how our customers look for information.

Many customers come to us to complete a transaction , such as renewing a passport or to change their address.

Many government transactions involve downloading forms or finding copies of a vital document, such as a birth certificate. Due to the preparation involved in completing some transactions, we know customers come to us for help with this step.

These customers know what they want but need help finding it . They might want to know how to get a free copy of their credit report or how to apply for Social Security benefits. We occasionally get inquiries that are very specific, such as the number of people on welfare in Kansas in 2011.

We know from survey comments that many customers want to browse information on a topic. They want to see all available health insurance options, for example.

More frequently, they may have an idea in mind about what information they want, but they do not know exactly what that information is. A popular example is financial assistance available from the government. Many customers want to know what assistance is available to them, but can’t articulate if they want a grant, loan, etc.

This also falls under finding specific information on a known topic, but the A-Z directory of federal agencies is so popular, it’s worth making a separate category. Customers are looking for contact information , especially hard to find information, such as the phone number for the IRS.

Steps in Developing USA.gov Personas

We drafted our personas in about two weeks and kept our process simple. We involved key stakeholders, such as managers, from the beginning. We also used data from multiple sources to inform our personas. To create personas for each type of customer, we picked some of the most common tasks people come to us to accomplish. We even had a little fun with data. After choosing an age in the most popular age range, we used the Social Security Administration’s baby name data to pick the most popular name for that year.

While the personas are composite representations, the quotes associated with them are from real customers. Because of time and resource constraints, we used customer satisfaction survey comments as the main source of qualitative data.

We’re sharing the personas across our organization and creating journey maps based on these personas and the common questions/scenarios they experience. The personas may evolve as we journey map, and we plan to revisit them annually to make sure we’re in step with customer motivations, emotions, goals, needs and behaviors. In the future, we plan to conduct first-person research with current and potential customers of USA.gov to inform our customer understanding and their associated journeys.

We will continue our persona development process to include USAGov en Español ( formerly known as GobiernoUSA.gov ) and future customers. This will ensure that we understand and meet ever changing needs. The complete list of our four personas is available (PDF, 1.9 MB, 5 pages).

In a future post, we will share examples of the customer journey maps associated with our personas.

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4 Customer Service Case Studies to Inspire You

Customer service case studies help attract new customers to your business by showing them how your company can help them. Instead of simply telling customers what you can do for them, you demonstrate it with storytelling and draw them in.

November 24, 2022

6 mins read

If you’ve researched any brand it’s more than likely you’ve come across a customer service case study. Real-life customer experiences are a powerful way to advertise a brand and showcase the real interactions customers have when approaching a company’s customer service department.

Instead of simply telling a customer what it’s like to benefit from a company’s customer service, they demonstrate genuine examples of customers who have submitted tickets to their customer service team. 

On the surface of it, one company can appear much like another without powerful customer service case studies to demonstrate its impact. Customers will be required to actually sign up to your service before they can experience your customer support for themselves. 

What is a customer service case study?

A customer service case study is a strategy to show the experiences of customers that have actually signed up to use your product or service and have actually witnessed your customer service for themselves. 

Potential customers who are researching what your company has to offer will benefit from the case studies of customers that have already passed through the buying decision. Instead of a company simply telling prospective customers what they have to offer, they will be able to demonstrate their service in reality. 

A customer service case study goes beyond being a simple testimonial, however. It’s factual evidence of customers who have implemented your company’s product or service and a demonstration of its ability to actually deliver results. 

Why are customer service case studies important? 

Without customer service case studies, your business will struggle to show how it is helping its customers. A case study shows your prospective customers how the business has performed in a real-life example of customer service, and helps them imagine what it would be like to do business with your company. 

Customer service case studies show potential customers how your business has helped customers to solve their problems and further their business goals. Although there are other ways to market your business, customer service case studies are a solid way to reach out to new prospects and convert them into customers. 

Successful customer case studies showcase successful examples of customer service that persuade your prospects to actually buy. They show prospects how well your customer service actually works and highlights your product’s value. 

How do you write a customer service case study?

There are a few strategies you need to follow when writing a customer service case study. Having a variety of different case studies will enable you to reach more potential customers which cover a range of situations and needs. 

1. Focus on your personas

You need to consider the type of the customer that you want to attract with your customer service case study. Mapping out your personas is an important part of your marketing strategy because it helps you identify prospects with unique wants and needs. Your customer service may appeal to different types of individuals and it’s crucial to target each one specifically. 

2. Tell a story

At their core, customer service case studies are stories about particular customers. Simply raving about how great your company is wil be boring for your readers, and you need to take them on a journey. Stories need to have obstacles to overcome, and your case study should show how your product or service is the hero of the narrative. 

3. Emphasize benefits

The benefits of your customer service will help to appeal to customers that have a specific pain point to solve. Instead of focusing on products or features it’s important to show how your service will help them. Your customer service case study is likely to be a representative example of a customer that has similar problems to other prospects, and it’s important to help prospective customers visualize using your service. 

4. Highlight the results 

Highlighting the results that your customer service will help your customers achieve means focusing on the before and after of using your service. Genuine improvements to your customer’s business will help to convince them that your product or service is the answer. Showing the results of your customer service helps customers see how they can save or make more money after choosing your business. 

4 interesting customer service case studies

Quick heal and kayako.

Here’s the first interesting customer service case study from Kayako. There was a company called Quick Heal Technologies which was a provider of internet security tools and anti-virus software. They had millions of global users, but they were struggling to deliver outstanding customer service due to a high volume of customer service requests. 

One of their main issues was the absence of a system to track requests from different sources. Agents were checking many different platforms for customer service requests, and lacked a vital overview of the customer experience. They were losing tickets and suffering from incomplete information. There were delays in the customer support experience and the existing system couldn’t manage its workflow. 

Enter Kayako, help desk software. Their Shared Inbox Solution brought together the different customer service platforms such as email, Facebook, Twitter, and live chat. Quick Heal agents were able to support customers seamlessly and minimize the number of tickets that were dropped. They could significantly reduce their ticket response times and accelerate the time to resolution. Agents were able to much more effectively collaborate and reduce duplication of effort. 

Springboard and Help Scout

The next customer service case study is about Springboard, a platform which provides online resources and personalized mentors to help students build their dream careers. Their aim is to make a great education accessible to anyone in the world. 

So far, they have worked with 250 mentors to train more than 5,000 students over 6 continents. Their success has depended on their ability to create an open environment where students feel comfortable requesting feedback and discovering course information on their own. 

Springboard needed a solution that could help them build relationships with their students, even if it’s over email, and they decided that Help Scout was the answer. They chose Help Scout because it means they can have human conversations rather than treating their students like a ticket number. 

They make use of Help Scout’s help desk features to find key insights into students’ conversations, as well as their Docs knowledge base which provides answers to common questions. As a result, students are able to more effectively learn and overcome problems when they arise. 

We’ve got another customer service case study from an airline – in this case, JetBlue. They really know how to make their customers smile with small gestures and ensure they can win customers for life. 

One customer called Paul Brown was flying with JetBlue from the smaller terminal at Boston’s Logan airport. He realized that he couldn’t grab his usual Starbucks coffee because there was no Starbucks at the terminal. On a whim, he sent a tweet to JetBlue asking them to deliver his venti mocha, and to his surprise they obliged! Within minutes JetBlue customer service representatives had delivered the coffee to Paul’s seat on the plane. 

This example of customer service shows that JetBlue is willing to go the extra mile for customers and will ensure that the company can continue to attract more customers.

Gympass and Slack

Gympass is an international platform that gives companies and their employees 50% to 70% off a global network of fitness studios, digital workouts, and mental health and nutrition services. It was founded in 2012 and has experienced steady growth, now worth more than USD $1 billion. Users of Gympass have access to 50,000 gyms and studios in more than 7,000 cities, so they can work out while they are on the move. 

The problem with this growing company was communication across the globe. The company was overly reliant on emails which led to silos and employees missing out on vital information. The solution to this problem was Slack, a communications platform which is made accessible to all new employees so they have everything they need right from the start. 

Now, teams at Gympass work across a range of 2,000 Slack channels which are open to 1,000 employees. They can share documents, messages and information, keeping connected across locations and facilitating new projects like event planning. It’s enabled Gympass to build a strong culture of collaboration and ensure that every employee can find the information they need. 

Wrapping up

Customer service case studies help attract new customers to your business by showing them how your company can help them. Instead of simply telling customers what you can do for them, you demonstrate it with storytelling and draw them in. Showing your customers benefits and outcomes support them to make the decision to purchase. 

Before they actually have a trial of using your product or service, it’s hard for customers to know what it would be like. Case studies can give a valuable preview into what it would be like to work with your company and highlight customers that have already achieved success. 

Catherine is a content writer and community builder for creative and ethical companies. She often writes case studies, help documentation and articles about customer support. Her writing has helped businesses to attract curious audiences and transform them into loyal advocates. You can find more of her work at https://awaywithwords.co.

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User Persona Survey Template: How to Properly Collect Customer Data in SaaS

Gathering meaningful insight from your customers is a challenge for any product manager: what you need is a handy user persona survey template to help you capture it…

We’re here to help!

In this article, we’re going to explore how user personas can help you gather and utilize customer insight more effectively.

  • A user persona is a representation of a specific type of user of your product. Personas represent real insights about your customers, not guesswork.
  • Rather than containing general information about the likes, dislikes, and demographics of your target audience, you’re best off ensuring they focus primarily on challenges, motivations , key objectives and jobs to be done .
  • What’s the primary difference between a user persona and a buyer persona? Where a user persona is representative of a user group, a buyer persona is an abstraction of the decision makers (i.e. those who decide whether to subscribe to your product, like a sales team or marketing team).
  • A user persona survey template is a pre-built questionnaire you can create, designed to elicit information from your target audience.
  • They’re useful because they help you understand areas of frustration (and build an experience around those), distinguish between user and buyer personas, understand your target audience better and identify your ideal customer persona.
  • There are a huge variety of different survey templates to choose from: signup flow, welcome screen , pain points, validating assumptions, churn, and long-form (just to name a few).
  • But to put any of this into practice and start tackling onboarding challenges , you need to choose the right tool for the job: Userpilot is a powerful, cost-effective option.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is an abstraction or representation of a specific type of user of your product. Importantly, personas represent real insights about your customers: they shouldn’t be built on shaky guesswork or assumptions.

The stronger the foundation of qualitative and quantitative data gathered through interviews, studies, and surveys, the more useful your personas will be.

Typically, a user persona will highlight your users ‘job-to-be-done’ (and how your product helps achieve that).

Good user persona examples

Should personas represent detailed information about likes, dislikes, and demographics?

Usually not .

Think about what you want to use your personas for. You’re best off ensuring they focus primarily on areas of frustration, challenges, and key objectives.

Mapping that out gives you the best opportunity to identify areas for improvement, and help your customers experience value faster.

It’s rare for SaaS products to cater to just one persona. On the flip side though, your user personas shouldn’t be too fragmented.

“If you try to please everyone, you will please no one.”

User personas vs buyer personas

What’s the primary difference between a user persona and a buyer persona? Well, a buyer isn’t always a user of your product:

  • A user persona should represent the people that actually use your product from one day to the next.
  • A buyer persona should reflect those who can make decisions about whether to pay out for your product or service (i.e. enabling users).

While buyer personas are important, you should always start with your user.

Because it’s only through building a quality product and providing an excellent service that you’ll ever be a competitive SaaS product .

You can only do that by understanding how users can make the most of your product.

What is a user persona survey template?

So we know user personas are extremely important. But we’ve also covered why personas are only as valuable as the insights that form them. Where do you get that data from in the first place?

Focused surveys that collect targeted information about your customers: their needs, pain points, roles, jobs to be done, and more.

How does a persona survey template help?

Creating and launching this sort of survey can help you and your SaaS in several different ways:

  • Differentiate between buyer personas and your actual users – As we discussed earlier, those with decision-making power aren’t always representative of your users themselves.
  • Understanding your customers’ pain – You create maximum value by leaning in and addressing your customers’ most prominent pain points . Onboarding surveys will help you understand what those are.
  • Map out key jobs to be done – To deliver the best possible experience, you need to have crystal clarity on why they’re using your product in the first place. Surveys are a helpful tool for understanding that – and then personalizing the experience accordingly.
  • Build personas around your ideal customer – Remember that trying to build something for everyone could ultimately mean you end up satisfying nobody . Personas help you get specific about that.

User persona survey template types you can use to create user personas

Now, we’re going to unpack some of the specific types of user persona survey templates you can deploy in your own SaaS to start understanding more about your customers.

Signup flow user persona survey template

Signup isn’t just about getting people into your app: you can use it as a valuable opportunity to gather valuable information about your customers and their needs.

Miro opts for an approach that gradually reveals more information in a structured, sequential way.

Interestingly, that means it’s simple to delve into far more specific areas (i.e. budget, individual use cases) depending on the complexity of your tool.

Here’s another example from Linkgraph adopting the same aproach.

Welcome screen user persona survey template

You don’t want to greet your users with a blank screen.

A welcome screen is all about creating a positive atmosphere from the very beginning. However, you can leverage the welcome screen to be so much more: this sort of specialist user persona survey typically involves asking a few targeted questions to understand their primary goals.

You can then use this information to personalize their onboarding experience (and deliver value faster).

Validate assumptions user persona research template

While the first two survey types help you to gather customer information and build up a richer picture of the type of users that have signed up, this survey type is to help with something completely different: challenging your assumptions.

You’ll collect data at various key touchpoints to help you validate certain assumptions about your users.

There are several variations to consider:

  • Customer satisfaction or CES surveys help you figure out areas of frustration and pain points with different aspects of your product and brand.
  • You might use a product-market fit (PMF) survey to help you understand whether your product strategy is paying dividends and is capturing the market accordingly.

Or, you might want to validate assumptions about how important specific features are to different user segments with bespoke surveys.

The idea is to test assumptions and continuously update your persona profiles using short in-app surveys .

User persona survey template for uncovering needs

Sometimes, you need to go back to basics: what is it your users actually want to get out of your product? What are the primary user needs that are driving their actions?

A fantastic way of uncovering those underlying needs is bespoke survey templates – precisely one focused on desired features.

Simply put, by polling your users directly you’ll be able to make more informed prioritization decisions.

And that’s the key to effective product management. Just keep in mind, not every request needs to be added to the roadmap. Prioritize based on user needs and product vision to avoid product bloat.

Understand pain points with user experience surveys and shape up your user personas

A slight variation on the previous user persona survey template, these are less focused on features and more about the broader context of your users’ experience.

That means broadening your repertoire far more than just lengthy surveys asking users directly about specific product features.

It could be short, punchy questions you ask – launched contextually – at different stages of the journey.

Ultimately, a SaaS owner or product manager needs to learn the art of gathering various different data sources together, collating, and then synthesizing the findings.

That’s the foundation of crafting an experience within your product that’ll help truly solve customer needs.

Understand negative user personas with churn surveys

It’s not all rosy, though. Inevitably, you are going to have a good chunk of users who decided to leave your product. It can happen for any number of reasons, and it’s important to understand why .

There are a couple of things that are particularly important to discover:

  • Opportunities for improvement. Users might leave your product because it simply falls short – it’s not good enough. Use data from churned users to figure out your weak points… and put yourself in the best position to strengthen them.
  • Your negative user persona. Just as you’ll have an ideal customer, there’ll be a user group who absolutely don’t want your product – no matter how smooth your onboarding , how powerful your features are, or the pull of your brand. You want to focus on a viable market segment, rather than customers in this group (they could have false expectations about your SaaS that’ll ultimately leave to churn).

Long-form user persona survey template

The devil is in the detail. We discussed earlier in the article the danger of bombarding users with lengthy surveys at the wrong moment. But sometimes, you just need a real depth of understanding. Long-form user survey templates give you that.

But how do you go about setting them up?

Typically, you’ll need incentives to encourage your users to fill them in.

You could reach out directly via email – but a clever alternative is to split a survey into dedicated chunks at different parts of the persona creation process.

How Userpilot can help you create better user persona survey templates

In this section of the blog, we’re going to unpack how Userpilot can help. There are other tools available, but none are quite as impressive or cost-effective.

Build welcome screens with user persona surveys and personalize onboarding

Userpilot makes it simple to build engaging, aesthetically pleasing welcome screens.

Not only can they be customized to fit your brand imagery, but the valuable data you gather on those screens can help you craft an effective, personalized onboarding experience.

Collect NPS data and understand power users

NPS surveys are the widely recognized industry standard for understanding customer loyalty – and using that as a proxy for making important product decisions.

NPS surveys are particularly effective at understanding the behavior of your power users (those who typically have a far greater knowledge of your product than the typical user).

Launch user experience surveys at the right time

For a user persona survey to be effective, it needs to land at the right time . There’s nothing worse than a random, glaring, annoying ask to do something when you’re just trying to do your job.

Think carefully about when, where, and how you launch a survey, and you’re bound to get more meaningful responses. Choose triggers at key points in the journey (i.e. just after a user has discovered a new feature).

Embed longer surveys in-app for better response rates

The last thing you want to do when asking users to complete long-form surveys is to be transported to another site.

Introducing that kind of friction into a journey just means you lose valuable data as customers will inevitably abandon the survey.

By embedding a survey within your app, you’re bound to improve response rates.

Use user persona data collected to improve user experience

No two users are the same – you need to put the data you’ve gathered to good use, and ensure that you personalize your in-app experience accordingly.

With advanced segmentation technology: create multiple personas (i.e. segments) based on a holistic range of data you’ve collected, and use that to craft bespoke, cohesive experiences that drive in-app engagement.

What a whirlwind! We’ve covered exactly what user persona templates are, the various different types of surveys available, when you’d use them (i.e. an onboarding process), and the best tool for integrating them within your product.

So what are you waiting for?

If you want to create product experiences code-free, book a demo call with our team and get started today! Click the link in the banner below for more information.

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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map template, the customer journey mapping process, data inputs for your customer journey map, why should you use customer journey maps, the uses of customer journey mapping, how to improve a customer journey, tools to help you with your journey mapping, see how xm for customer frontlines works, customer journey mapping 101: definition, template & tips.

22 min read Find out about how to start customer journey mapping, and how to improve it for the benefit of your customers and the business.

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be able to understand and adapt the customer journey you offer when someone interacts with your organization. Whether their journey is entirely online , offline, or a blend of both, there are multiple journeys a customer might undergo.

Understanding the customer journey in depth helps you identify and take action on customer pain points and repeat what’s working. By doing this, you will improve the overall experience that your customers have, which will have better outcomes for your business.

Outlining the potential customer journeys your audience might go through requires a process called customer journey mapping.

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs , and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.

It enables you to assess:

  • Insights – from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
  • Impact – how to optimize budgets and effort for changes we want to make to the customer experiences
  • Issues/opportunities – Diagnose the existing customer journey
  • Innovation – where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

A customer journey map gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience.

When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.

If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours , after picking the color, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.

Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand and service teams are key to helping you reach your business goals. But you can only do that by understanding the journey your customers go on in order to get there, what they’re thinking and needing from you at that time. Developing a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so you can understand them better than ever before.

Getting started when creating a customer journey map template doesn’t have to be difficult. However, your customer journey map template will need to cover several elements in order to be effective.

There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meets customer needs at that moment in time – and where the experience does not, and needs some improvement.

Understanding their behaviors and attitudes also means you can fix bad experiences more effectively too because you know why you haven’t met your customers’ expectations and what you need to do to make amends. There may be times when things go wrong, but it’s how you adapt and what you do to fix these experiences that separates the best. Knowing how the customer will be feeling makes taking that decisive action much easier.

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

  • Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
  • Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
  • The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
  • The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

So what could the customer journey map examples look like when starting the process of buying a car?

customer journey steps

Customer journey vs process flow

Understanding customer perspective, behavior, attitudes, and the on-stage and off-stage is essential to successfully create a customer journey map – otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where the customer is interacting with your brand, you’re typically missing up to 40% of the entire customer journey.

There is no single customer journey. In fact, there are multiple. The best experiences combine multiple journeys in a seamless way to create a continuous customer lifecycle as outlined below.

customer journey loop

Getting started with customer journey map templates

To begin, start by choosing a journey that you would like to create a customer journey map for and outline the first step that customers will take.

You can use this customer journey map template below to work out the customer behaviors, attitudes, the on-stage and off-stage processes – and the KPIs attached to measuring the success of this experience.

Download our free journey mapping template here

The step-by-step process of mapping the customer journey begins with the buyer persona .

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

In order to effectively understand the customer journey, you need to understand the customer – and this is where creating a persona really helps. You may base this around the most common or regular customers, big spend, or new customers you haven’t worked with before. This persona is beyond a marketing segment , but that can be a great place to begin if you’re just starting out on the mapping process for your organization.

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

  • Family status
  • Professional goals
  • Personal goals

These personas help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and can be derived from insights and demographic data , or even customer interviews . This works for both B2B and B2C business models, but in B2B especially you’ll have multiple customers for each opportunity so it’s recommended you build out multiple personas.

To begin, start with no more than three personas to keep things simple.

Create a diverse team

When creating a customer journey map, you also need to build out a diverse mapping team to represent the whole business. Include frontline staff , day-to-day management, corporate teams, HR, and business support functions. They will give you vital feedback, advice, and perspectives you hadn’t thought of.

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

Select a customer journey map to construct, then build a behavior line. This might be a new customer journey, renewal, or fixing a product issue. You might also choose this based on the most frequent customer journeys taken, or the most profitable.

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

  • Who are the people involved in this journey? E.g. if you’re in a car dealership, that might be the customer, the sales rep, and front-of-house staff.
  • What are the processes or the things that happen during this journey?
  • What are the customer attitudes ? What are they feeling at this time? Go beyond excitement or frustration. Bring these feelings to life. This car is my dream come true!
  • What is the moment that matters? Identify the greatest moment of emotional load. The make or break where everything could be good up until that point, but if you get that moment of maximum impact wrong, then all that’s good is forgotten. The best experience brands get this moment right and identifying it is an important first step to achieving that. In that moment, ask yourself what are the things/people/processes involved? Think about this for the whole business – across your product , brand , and service teams.
  • But beyond identifying this moment, you need to establish what your customers’ needs are. What are they getting out of this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly? Knowing the answer to these questions can help you deliver experiences that will resonate , and respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances or issues.
  • And finally, how do you measure how effectively you are meeting customer needs throughout the journey? Set KPIs to put benchmarks in place for your customer journey map and customer experience and track your progress.

Step 4 – Innovate

When you are mapping out your customer journey, brainstorm ideas for how to improve that moment that really matters . These ideas don’t need to be practical, but by putting together a diverse mapping team from around the business you can begin to filter through these ideas.

Then, test it.

Ask yourself: Is it feasible? Is it viable? Is it desirable? Don’t ask can we do it, ask should we do it? Then you can start to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Step 5 – Measure

Use the customer journey map to decide on your measurement framework.

Who are you measuring? What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? And why? And finally, what metrics and KPI’s are in place to measure this?

customer journey metrics

Your customer journey map process will require you to use several different data inputs to get an accurate picture of how your customers behave and where you can improve their experience.

A customer journey map is often developed using data gleaned from customer feedback you’ve requested . While this type of market research is useful, your research process needs to be deeper to gain a richer, more accurate understanding of your customer’s behavior.

To create a customer journey map that accurately reflects the truth of customer actions and intentions, you need to take into account both solicited and unsolicited data.

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

Solicited data includes the customer feedback you gain when you conduct research through surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or ask customers for feedback on social media. This approach can be very useful for understanding your customer’s point of view , rather than just making assumptions about how they think and behave.

However, your target audiences won’t tell you everything about what they plan to do when undergoing their customer journey. Though they might tell you that they’ve had a great experience in a particular part of their customer journey, this type of feedback presents a few issues:

  • You have to know when to ask for feedback : You might already have a customer journey in mind when asking for feedback – but do you know all the routes a customer might take in your customer journey map?
  • It’s a snapshot: When you survey customers, you’ll likely only get insights into their experience at that particular moment about a specific touchpoint
  • It’s what customers say they think/will do, not what they actually think/will do: You’re relying on your customers to accurately reflect their sentiment and intentions in their responses, which isn’t always the case. For your customer journey map to be effective, you need to find the truth
  • Your sample size might be too small : If you’re trying to understand how a relatively niche customer journey is doing, you might find that the number of customers who have not only taken the customer journey but are willing to respond with feedback is very limited. You can’t risk survey fatigue by polling the same audience several times, so your insights are limited
  • You’re only getting part of the picture : You will likely have several types of useful customer data on file, but these are often not considered as part of the process when creating a customer journey design because solicited data takes precedence

You’ll need to infer how customers feel to be able to accurately predict the actions a customer takes. To do so, you’ll need to look at unsolicited data.

Unsolicited data

Unsolicited data covers everything your customers aren’t telling you directly when you ask them and contextual data that you likely already collect on them, such as purchase history. It can be taken from various sources, such as your website and social channels, third-party sites, customer calls, chat transcripts, frontline employee feedback , operational sources, and more.

This type of data is nuanced, but it allows you to establish the truth of your customers’ experience. The ability to gather unsolicited customer feedback from every channel enables you to see more than just what a customer tells you directly. Using real-time feedback gathering and natural language understanding (NLU) models that can detect emotion, intent, and effort, you’ll be able to understand your customers’ actions in a more profound way. Unsolicited data offers you a 100% response rate that better indicates what your customers actually think of each step in their customer journey.

Rather than be limited to a small sample size of customers who respond to surveys, you’ll be able to build an accurate picture of the average customer on each step of the customer journey map by using this richer insight data with your own operational data.

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

With solicited data, you don’t always see why a customer behaves or thinks as they do. For example, a customer might tell you that they would recommend you to a friend or family – but they don’t renew their subscription with you. A customer might be an ideal candidate for a particular journey, but they abandon their basket when prompted to give their personal details. Understanding the why behind customer actions is key for designing a great customer journey, and that’s why both solicited and unsolicited data collection and evaluation are necessary for creating great customer journey maps.

Of course, knowing how customers will actually respond to your customer touchpoints is only part of the process. You may need to develop more than one customer journey map and create sub-audiences for your customer personas to accurately see where you can rectify pain points and improve outcomes. You will need to collect and analyze contextual data across all customer journey touchpoints and develop a highly detailed journey map that can unveil routes your customers might be taking without your knowledge.

Qualtrics’ Experience ID platform can overlay solicited and unsolicited data to provide an all-encompassing picture of your customer journey map, no matter how complex. Creating an effective customer journey map is easier with all your data collated and analyzed together, with actionable insights created automatically.

A customer journey map creates a common understanding for the organization of how a customer interacts during different stages of the customer lifecycle, and the roles and responsibilities of the different teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

It will also bring an organization together, and foster empathy and collaboration between teams because people will know what is required from everyone in the business to deliver the experiences that customers expect. This will help you to develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship, which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture . With everyone working towards a common goal, communication of what you learn about the customer and the journey they go through is vital in order to drive best practices throughout the organization.

Creating an accurate customer journey map will help your customer service team to focus on more specific issues, rather than handling problems generated by a less-tailored customer journey. Your customer experience will be improved with a customer journey that’s personalized to the specific personas you have generated. You’ll have put yourself in your customer’s shoes and adapted your strategy to reflect your customer’s perspective – which in turn will create more memorable experiences.

Creating a customer journey map will influence your journey analytics across the business. So for example, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, why you ask it and how you ask questions in your Voice of the Customer Program .

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

  • Assess the current state of your customer journey Understand and diagnose the specific issues in current experiences
  • Understand what the future state of your customer journey should look like Design, redesign and create new experiences
  • Blueprints For implementing change
  • Communication Bringing teams together to train and scale up best practices.

Take stock and take action

To improve the customer journey you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and you need to make a distinction between the present and the future.

  • What is your customer journey right now?
  • What does the future state of your customer journey look like?

This is why organizations blueprint their customer journey because they can see what works and act accordingly. By understanding your customers’ attitudes and needs at critical times in the journey, you can make amends to better meet them – and develop contingencies to cope when these needs aren’t or can’t be met. For example, during a sudden, unexpected surge in demand.

Orchestrate your customer journey

To offer your customers truly optimized experiences, you’ll need to go further than just creating a customer journey map. You’ll also need to orchestrate journeys using real-time customer behavior to adapt your strategy as your customers make choices. Orchestrating a journey means taking dynamic action towards optimizing your customer’s experience, using real-time customer behavior as informative data.

Improve your employee experience

Use your diverse mapping team to come up with ideas that incorporate experience from all aspects of the business to improve the customer journey – and remember that this has a significant payoff for your employees too. Improving the employee journey – by giving teams the tools to make a difference – can have a positive knock-on effect for the customer and improve their experience in those key moments. This is because employees have the autonomy and motivation in their roles to help their customers, and realize their own potential.

Your customer journey map isn’t just designed to improve the customer experience. Creating an accurate customer journey map can help you to improve your business outcomes.

Being able to link operational data to key touchpoints in a customer journey is transformative for organizations. This is because improving segments of the customer journey will see a direct impact on your business. The Qualtrics Journey Optimizer helps you do just that. By analyzing areas for improvement as outlined by your customer journey map, organizations can take actions that will have maximum benefit for their customers, and the business too.

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

  • Create a common understanding throughout your workforce of how a customer interacts with your organization, and you’ll know the roles and responsibilities of your different teams
  • Develop empathy and collaboration between teams, working together to achieve the same outcome
  • Develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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  2. 7 Persona Examples for Modeling Your Ideal Customer

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  3. Customer Analysis Step-by-step Guide Understanding Your Customer (2022)

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  4. Best Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples

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  5. User Persona for Mobile App Case Study on Behance

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COMMENTS

  1. 4 Powerful Buyer Persona Case Studies that Transformed These Businesses

    Genesis Systems Group: Developed buyer personas, using internal insights, significantly improved marketing alignment and customer-centricity, boosting lead generation. #1 Pegasystems Case Study Pegasystems (Pega) is a software company specializing in customer relationship management, digital process automation, and business process management.

  2. How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [+Free Persona

    The image below is a B2B buyer persona for someone who works in HR. The persona paints a clear picture of the target customer's struggles and how the business can best meet those needs. In this case, HR recruiting tools streamline processes, make recruiting easier, and help HR expertly manage their overall job duties. B2C Buyer Persona Example

  3. Customer Success Stories and Case Studies

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  4. The Power of Focused Buyer Personas: A Case Study

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  5. Customer Personas

    Using Customer Persona Development to Upgrade the Customer Experience and Unveil New Growth Opportunities . Developing Customer Personas and Analyzing the Voice of the Customer. After conducting in-depth primary and secondary interviews, we designed full-scale personas to help our client understand and visualize the customer experience.

  6. How To Create Customer Personas (with Actual, Real-Life Data)

    The case for building customer personas with data-driven research. ... If the above studies aren't enough to make you quiver in your boots, take a look at the debacle of JCPenney's 2012 rebranding. Within a month of becoming CEO, Ron Johnson launched a radical rebranding. He changed the look and feel of stores—getting rid of lucrative ...

  7. Customer personas, successful products & campaigns

    Understanding your customer personas can help you improve products, ensure effective marketing campaigns, increase revenue and more. Products. Product Overview ... They respond to reviews and case studies that build trust in your brand with social proof. The Brand Devotee is a loyal brand customer. They know your products, are repeat customers ...

  8. Case Studies: Effective Customer Persona Applications

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  9. What is a Customer Persona? Definition, uses, and examples

    A customer persona is a semi-fictional archetype that depicts a particular segment of your audience and gives you a holistic view of your consumers based on the commonalities they share. These similarities can be in terms of their goals, pain points, motivations, frustrations, and expectations. Built with data collected from market research ...

  10. How to Build Customer Personas: The Complete Guide

    Case Studies: How Customer Personas Really Work. Here are a couple more examples of companies using customer personas to their benefit: A travel company, Eindhoven365, conducted accurately targeted consumer surveys. They discovered that their most profitable customers fell into three categories:

  11. 50+ buyer persona statistics that showcase their effectiveness

    Three to four buyer personas account for over 90% of a company's sales.; With personas, Thomson Reuters saw a 175% surge in marketing revenue, 10% uptick in leads sent to sales, and 72% reduction in lead conversion time.; Increase customer centricity and user engagement. Buyer personas play a big role in making a brand (and product) customer-centric and increasing user engagement.

  12. Use Cases for Design Personas: A Systematic Review and New Frontiers

    While such case studies are highly useful for ... Joni Salminen, and Bernard J. Jansen. 2018. Customer segmentation using online platforms: isolating behavioral and demographic segments for persona creation via aggregated user data. ... Anand K. Gramopadhye, and Steve J. Davis. 2007. A Case Study on Use of Personas in Design and Development of ...

  13. Case study: How to Build User Personas

    Phase 1 of Building User Personas: Conduct demographics data from Google Analytics. In order to get a general understanding of who websites users are we took a look into GA demographics reports to understand how users gender, age, country and other characteristics impact users behaviour. Demographics Overview report from Google Analytics.

  14. Case study: how to create a customer persona using ChatGPT

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  15. Defining a customer persona

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  16. Customer Persona Best Practices + Template

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  17. What are customer personas and why are they so important?

    A customer persona, on the other hand, allows brands to better understand these homogenous groups, and to recognise key traits within them. In order to create a representative sample of an audience, personas are based on the analysis and research of real customers. This helps to build a much more detailed picture of the (hypothetical) customer ...

  18. Customer Personas: How to Activate for Success and Avoid Pitfalls

    By genericizing their personas, they left a lot of business on the table and wasted a lot of money. Pitfall #3: Avoid quantitatively driven personas. People are not merely collections of data points. It bears repeating: the best customer personas begin with interviewing real customers.

  19. Using Personas to Better Understand Customers: USA.gov Case Study

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  20. 4 Customer Service Case Studies to Inspire You

    1. Focus on your personas. You need to consider the type of the customer that you want to attract with your customer service case study. Mapping out your personas is an important part of your marketing strategy because it helps you identify prospects with unique wants and needs.

  21. User Persona Survey Template: How to Properly Collect Customer Data in SaaS

    Where a user persona is representative of a user group, a buyer persona is an abstraction of the decision makers (i.e. those who decide whether to subscribe to your product, like a sales team or marketing team). A user persona survey template is a pre-built questionnaire you can create, designed to elicit information from your target audience.

  22. Customer Journey Mapping 101: Definition, Template & Tips

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  23. Case study: Creating user personas for Google's UX design certificate

    The user personas are fictional characters that are created using real data gathered from our interview subjects. Here's what the course material says -. "Personas are created by conducting user research and identifying common pain points, which are UX issues that frustrate and block the user from getting what they need from a product.