Who are our
customers, what are they like and what do they want? Those are important
questions for every company and business who are trying to be competitive and
serve their customers well. One way to answer those questions is to
compartmentalize your customer into main categories, profiles. It underlines
the main characteristics of the customers dividing them into different customer
profiles. You could have four customer profiles or dozens depending on your
business. The aim in customer profiles is to identify what kind of customers
use the company’s services so that it is possible to design services for specific
customers.
How is it done? How
can companies know what their customers are like? Companies have few tools to
gather information about their clients. When a client buys from e-commerce, he
or she gives a lot of basic information to that business. It is the same thing
if you buy something from a store and you use your membership card or a
discount card. Company can then analyse for example what type of customer buys
Coca-Cola. But that is just basic data about the customer, where he or she
lives and how old he or she is. It doesn’t give any answers to the questions:
what the customer wants from our services and what are they like.
Here qualitative
research comes in handy. Interviewing people is a great way to reveal a lot of
important information about the customers and the current state of the offered
service. Interviews can cover people from potential customers to staff of the
business. When you have a wide view about the service and about different
customer profiles, it is easy to design a service for your intended audience.
Let’s have an
example. Even in this economy some people buy cars so let’s think about for
example Volkswagen dealer. They have a widespread of different models that people
buy from different reasons. Their customers also expect different kind of
services. Some might be just browsing and they are not seriously considering on buying so they might
look at the cars and leave. A different customer is a serious buyer and wants
to take the car to a test drive and the third customer is a person who wants to
have a meaningful conversation about the mechanics of the car with the
salesperson. These customer profiles are very diverse from each other and the
company has to take that into a count. The company might focus on one important
customer profile so that their needs and demands are met, or they could design
services for all of the profiles or a few of them. Either way it is always
important to know your customer.
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| http://www.andertoons.com/car/cartoon/3220/i-like-it-but-im-looking-for-more-of-status-symbol-any-way-you-can-double-price |
One way to
understand your customer is to make a customer’s journey map. It is a
representation of a customer’s trip to use a specific service. Journey map
basically breaks customer experience into small pieces. It shows step by step
what the customer goes through in order use your service. It has a starting
point and an end, both which you determine however you like. For example the
journey could start from having a need and it ends when the need is fulfilled. When
you are doing a customer journey map, you should always ask yourself what happens
next. It is as simple as that.
A great thing in
journey maps is that, when you break down the path you can design specifically for
one moment in that path. For example if the customer has to walk across a busy
street in order to use your services, what can you do to ease the access to
your business? Maybe you can’t do anything but without the journey map, you might not even know that
there was such a problem.
Below is an example
of a journey map, where a customer buys a mobile phone.
 |
| http://customerexperienceplanning.com/2012/04/11/customer-journey-mapping-part-i-the-basics/ |
Sources:
Moritz, S. 2005.
Service Design. Practical access to an evolving field.
http://vimeo.com/78554759
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