data-driven personasin customer service

 
Two thirds of all customers would switch brands if they felt they were just a ticket number and not treated as an individual. For you, this means: Give customers the same attention after the purchase as before. If you provide excellent customer service, you automatically build a loyal customer base. This allows you to spend customer acquisition costs elsewhere, build an organic referral system and gain case studies, testimonials and reviews that build and extend trust.

And you can do all this best with the help of data-based personas.

Closer customer loyalty thanks to personas

Even a 5 % increase in customer loyalty can increase profits by 25 %. This is because regular customers increasingly spend more on their brand - up to three times as much. Companies can therefore reduce operating costs. Personas help: they use data to show what customers expect in the future. Customer service can better understand what customers want and what language they speak. Product developers can align new functions or products accordingly.

This in turn leads to increasing customer loyalty - i.e. a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and thus to a greater total turnover per customer account, for example thanks to up- and cross-selling offers.

Personas for consistent brand perception

When you are new to a company, the first step is usually to develop an understanding of what the brand or company stands for. Customers go through the same process: by looking at the company website, social media profiles, advertising or other marketing activities, or talking to others in their private lives about experiences with the company or brand. If all marketing activities are based on data-based personas, this leads to a uniform, consistent and reliable brand perception.

Even more important are data-driven personasfor customer service, because it has the responsibility to represent the company's brand(s) in direct contact with customers. Thanks to data-based personas, companies lay the foundation for good customer service: because then the desired and trained internal brand perception coincides with that of the actual customers. If the brand message deviates from reality, this quickly leads to frustration among customers and ultimately to their churn.

data-driven personascan counteract this dynamic. There is not just one external brand perception, but different ones, as different customers have had different experiences with the company. Ideally, personas reflect these different brand perceptions and help customer service to better understand and categorise them. The company can address these personalised perceptions with targeted concepts and sensitively steer them in a different direction.

A simple example: If a persona profile reflects that complex technical specifications do not matter, customer service should neglect them in communication and instead focus on brand features such as sustainability or quality.

Personas make customer service staff happy

Customer service staff deal with demanding or dissatisfied customers on a daily basis. Optimal internal support is what enables them to deal with customers in the way they expect.

Personas play an essential role here. Customer service is expected to solve customers' problems in a targeted and efficient way. This is easier if the employees have a basic understanding of the different types of customers - know their corresponding problems, solutions, emotions and needs and can put themselves in the customers' shoes. Derived from personas, conversation guidelines optimally support the employees in customer service.

Personas make customers happy - and bring recommendations

72% of customers share a positive experience with six or more people. Speed, efficiency, personalisation and solution orientation evoke a positive feeling. This is exactly where data-driven personascomes into play: Psychographic characteristics such as character traits or emotion analyses are essential components of a persona profile for customer service. They make it possible to quickly understand the counterpart in order to be able to respond specifically to needs. Ideally, a company maps its customer base with personas. Based on customer data, the CRM system then immediately recognises which persona the callers belong to when they call/customer contact and thus guides the customer service staff in the desired direction even before the customer contact begins.

Why this is crucial? According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers worldwide say they trust word of mouth or recommendations more than any other form of advertising. Referral marketing is worth $6 trillion a year and accounts for 13% of global sales.

Personas help to charge higher prices for goods and services

67 % of customers would pay extra for better customer service. For example, in order to be able to reach someone immediately by phone at the customer service of the mobile phone provider who knows the personal situation and takes care of the concern immediately.

This means that good customer service can lead to customers being willing to accept higher prices.

To do this, employees must always be informed about market conditions or problems - for example, thanks to dynamic, data-driven personas that lead to me being able to specifically address my counterpart about his or her concern in the language he or she speaks: "You are probably calling about problem XYZ, right? We are aware of the problem and look forward to your call!" And because the customer service representative knows from the customer profile that I am tech-savvy, he tells me a funny story related to that very fact. Suddenly the dynamic changes; you are not a number, but a real person who feels understood and helped. And this experience is definitely worth a few euros more every month.

Such data for personas is easy to obtain: 79% of customers would share relevant and personal information if it meant that contextual interactions were instantly recognised and understood. Many companies complain that GDPR or cookie restrictions make it increasingly difficult to collect data and information about their customers. But like everything in life, interaction between businesses and customers is a give and take. Constantly demanding but offering nothing in return except the next promotional offer is not the incentive customers need.

Customer service as a source of insights and profound persona creation

Just as customer service benefits from data-based personas, data-driven personascan benefit from customer service: Because the feedback, reactions, objections, suggestions and feedback - in short: everything that customer service employees experience and document in their customer contact should flow into data-generated personas. Because customers change and so do the data-based personas.

The answers gained in direct customer conversations help to improve strategies, products, marketing and many other areas. Often, these answers are more honest, more natural and, above all, more up-to-date than survey-collected or behaviour-based data via cookies.