Do you want to become more Customer centric?

Can you confidently answer questions in your projects, such as, ‘Who exactly is your target audience?' and ‘Are your solutions and ideas actually addressing customer needs?’ 

Answering these basic questions actually do take a bit of effort – however, the alternative would be to unknowingly dive into solution design that may result in “solutions” that are neither used nor appreciated by customers. Even creating Personas based on assumptions can noticeably shift the focus of project members toward the human perspective.

Therefore, we regularly host Persona workshops at the #AllianzGDF. So, let's have a look at such an example.

How do Personas work?

Personas are an archetypical representation of your target customers, where you define their characteristics as you go. This enables every project member to easily imagine and keep in mind the customers they create solutions for.

For example, the board below shows 3 different Personas: Ana, Javier, and Teresa that were quickly created on an assumption basis.

Ana represents a 25-year-old female, who is single and has just started her first job. She knows little about insurance but tends to listen to her peers and is very active online. She uses a pre-paid phone, has no car, and has no Allianz policy.

Javier represents a 40-year-old male, married, employed, and Catholic. He has children between the ages of 1 and 5 years old, has a dog and a car. He has some knowledge of insurance but doesn’t have a lot of time to research more about it.

Teresa represents a 55-year-old grandmother with a big family. She is a skilled worker, rich in assets and owns a holiday home, but is not too trusting of the government. She is taking care of her old parents and knows that she also needs to take care of herself.

After creating Personas and understanding their characteristics, we can easier identify which service they might or might not need. For example, Ana is not likely to use services such as a babysitter, travel plan, or home help services, while these services would be valuable for Javier and Teresa.

We can also determine which channels would be best for which type of customers based on their Personas. For example, Ana is much less likely to consult an agent for insurance topics than Javier and Teresa, while Ana and Javier are more likely to use social media in comparison to Teresa.

What does this mean?

Personas serve to keep the customer perspective when creating any services or solutions. They paint a vivid picture of the customers making their pain points, needs and mindset more tangible.

For the participants of the workshop, doing the Personas exercise helped them understand their customers better, prioritize services and being able to tell a credible story around these services and their potential usage. 

 

Interested in more topics like this? Then follow GDF on LinkedIn!