Help Employees Grok Customers

As long as I have been kicking around the CRM community, it has been understood that employees are one of your most important weapons in the battle to deliver an extraordinary customer experience. Poorly trained and motivated employees can turn off customers faster than showy ad campaigns can bring them in. Research I did a few years ago identified one of the biggest stumbling blocks is employees who aren’t able to put themselves in the shoes of the customers they serve. How can they become ambassadors for your company if they don’t “get” customers?

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term "grok" in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that literally means "to drink," In more recent years, grok has come to mean to understand to the point where the concept becomes part of the person understanding it, and changes the way that person views the world and life around them due to the intimacy of that understanding. At Forrester, we see a rise in the use of Personas to help employees to grok customers – to understand and obsess about customer needs.

My colleague at Forrester, Moira Dorsey, tells me that Personas help companies focus on what is important to customers in designing interactions. Personas are models that represent key user attributes, goals, and behaviors. They are presented as a vivid narrative description of a single “person” who represents a behavioral segment. They are based on primary research – typically interviews, observations, or both – to understand users’ goals, attitudes, and behaviors.

Companies have used personas to improve the quality of products ranging from software to Web sites to physical environments. Moira reports firms increasingly use personas to differentiate their interactive marketing and sales efforts as well. For example, as the complexity of their products for small and medium-sized companies went up, execs at Nortel needed a way to help sales reps tailor their approach based on their prospects' needs. Nortel worked with Quarry Integrated to craft personas that helped them understand the goals and attributes of each prospect. Next, Quarry created "Coach," an interactive tool that lets sales reps anticipate buyers' goals at successive stages in the buying cycle and progressively discloses everything from the most relevant product information to recommended closing techniques. The results? Nortel has saved time and money on training and increased sales productivity.

Persona rooms created by the design agency Organic for clients like DaimlerChrysler recreate the living space of target customers, incorporating the media and products customers buy. Giving personas a physical presence helps employees get to know consumers at a visceral level and understand whom they are marketing and selling to. Employees from Organic and DaimlerChrysler agencies even hold meetings in the persona rooms — which means that they are literally surrounded by the car buyer's crumpled receipts and pizza boxes. This helps marketers quickly pare lists of campaign ideas down to what's most likely to resonate with target customers.

Don’t let your employees become strangers in a strange land of customers.