Customer Personas

Executive Summary

Andrew Reise crafted in-depth customer personas, unearthed customer pain points across the omnichannel experience, and identified high-return opportunities for a more than 100-year-old footwear retailer. The project used stakeholder and customer interviews along with research into customer shopping and buying trends to assemble an enterprise voice of the customer (VoC) roadmap. By creating thorough customer personas, we were able to help our client identify customer pain points, urgent needs, and opportunities to boost customer loyalty. Ultimately, the client came away with a full set of personas and a plan to leverage them to drive higher retention and growth.

Business Challenge

Especially in the retail space, consumer behaviors are shifting. As customers adopt a new mix of online and in-store shopping, their needs and preferences are morphing. Companies must dig deep into the current customer experience to identify the best path toward growth. Without thorough personas and a strong voice of the customer roadmap, it’s easy for organizations to lose touch with customer experiences—and thus miss the chance to drive deeper customer loyalty.

Our client needed to reset its customer experience (CX) plan, better understand current shoppers’ behaviors, and carve out a clearer picture of its customers’ wants, needs, friction points, and expectations. Although the client had a surface-level understanding of its customers, it wanted to dive deeper into customer experiences and shed light on opportunities to improve those experiences in the current retail environment. Every second the client operated without in-depth personas, it was missing out on new opportunities to build meaningful customer relationships, widen its customer base, and accelerate growth.

How Andrew Reise Helped

We started by conducting nearly a dozen stakeholder interviews and workshops to see how company leaders viewed their customer journey and friction points. Next, we used interviews and web surveys to gather extensive data about customer experiences across all of our client’s customer interaction points. From there, we created personas, analyzed the voice of the customer, built a voice of the customer inventory list, and identified what actions to prioritize in order to drive different company goals.

Using Customer Persona Development to Upgrade the Customer Experience and Unveil New Growth Opportunities

Developing Customer Personas and Analyzing the Voice of the Customer

After conducting in-depth primary and secondary interviews, we designed full-scale personas to help our client understand and visualize the customer experience. These customer representations allowed our client’s teams to empathize with potential and current customers, identify fractured experiences, and find the biggest opportunities to deepen their relationships. 

Uncover Consumer Shopping and Buying Trends

We used customer persona research to zero in on current shopping habits and buying patterns for our client’s target customers. These insights revealed the best ways to reach these consumers and elevate the customer experience.

Plotting and Prioritizing Voice of the Customer Needs

Through customer persona development, we analyzed friction points across both digital and brick-and-mortar shopping experiences. Next, we measured the gaps in the customer’s experience, developed a full voice of the customer map, and laid out a prioritization list to identify the most immediate and high-impact changes our client could implant into the customer experience.

We Speak Customer

It’s a language we know very well. We’re Andrew Reise, a recognized global thought leader that specializes in improving both sides of the company/customer relationship. Our unique approach consists of our own methodology and a group of distinctly selected consultants who are all veterans in customer experience. Our process is proven, and our people boast a “do it all” no-nonsense approach and are empowered to do the right thing—even if that means going above and beyond the original scope of work.