One of the main consequences for companies in 2020, when citizen mobility has been drastically reduced, has been the need to be able to “sell” online.

There is an urgent need to define a new business positioning or even create new marketing channels. For example, door-to-door sales will not come back, it is not going to happen anymore, that has already changed. We have to find ways to reinvent new business channels.

And this is one of the great challenges:

who do I want to sell to?

Who would want to buy me?

Who is my customer or user and what is he/she like?

Not only does this need to know our potential audience well arise, but also the business economy is not in a position to spend a lot of money trying to find its customers. Companies want their marketing investments to be accurate and to achieve good results with the minimum investment.

I want to introduce you to a tool that will help us discover and get to know our potential customers: the Customer Persona!

And in a large organization?

This need to know our customers and users is not exclusive to small companies or the marketing department. On numerous occasions we have used this tool to work with a work team within a large organization with very good results.

It is common for teams that do not belong to customer support or do not have direct contact with them to be unaware of who they are doing the work for. The black box model where on the one hand we enter requirements and on the other hand we get the result of the requests is all too common. In many cases, teams are unaware of who the work they are doing is for, which makes the results not the most appropriate for the final recipient.

Knowing the people who will be using the solution in which we participate offers us several benefits:

• Purpose: teams understand why and for whom they do what they do. They know there will be someone who will use it: they are making a positive impact on other people’s lives.
• Empathy: knowing who the recipient of your work is helps to focus on the most appropriate solution for that user or client. This totally changes the objective of their work.

These benefits for any team can be obtained by using the Customer Persona tool.

Customer Person

After explaining the numerous benefits that the use of this tool can offer both in small company teams and in teams within a wide organizational fabric, let’s discuss it!

The Customer Persona, also called “Persona” in some bibliography, is a tool that allows us to represent in a visual and detailed way the important information related to a segment of people (our users). We could also say that it allows us to turn our target customer segments into “people”.

If we do a good job and the Customer Persona incorporates all the valuable information, it will allow us to be much more successful in everything we do:

• product development,
• choose channels to attract customers,
• segmenting within channels such as Facebook,
• choose the media in which to advertise,
• tailor messages to customers’ interests and challenges.

How a Customer Persona is made

First we must start with the segmentation of our customer types, in order to know who our target segments are.

Once we have identified the different customer segments, we can begin to describe each of our targets and turn them into a “persona”. That is, we can create a Customer Persona to describe each of them.

In the following example we have two different Customer Personas, each for a target segment identified prior to the development of a flight incident management application. One is from the user-passenger point of view and the other from the user-customer service point of view.

An example of the different data to be able to describe the different Customer Personas in detail are the following points.

• Who and how is our Customer?
  • General biographical data
  • Lifestyle
  • Likes and hobbies
  • Motivations and desires
  • Behavior
• How does our customer act with our product/service?
  • How do you solve the problem?
  • What do you like about our product?
  • How do you use our product or service?

However, you can find an infinite number of Customer Personas available on the Internet.

Other uses of Customer Persona

This tool is very useful to know our user or customer in order to develop the product that adds value or meets their needs. But at the same time, we have used this tool in other areas, for example, to retain a company’s most important asset: people!

It is vitally important that the departments responsible for people in an organization know their employees. If you do not know who you are addressing, there is a high probability of not getting the actions or proposals right.

If we want to have motivated, creative and proactive employees, it is essential to know them!