Why focus customer and the personas are needed?

In addition to the personas creation, the goal for us in the Service Design team was to raise the awareness of the focus customer in the company and to know better to whom we are doing the product, how they are using it, what are the pain points and how they would like to operate in the future. The customer and user awareness were relatively low in the organization at that time. After having the customer understanding and the personas work in solid level, I created learning materials and started arranging internal presentation and learning sessions, dedicated for different functions. The content of this page is a short summary from that material. First some basics:

What is End-to-End Customer Experience in B2B?

In B2B, when the customer is a company, it means several people (personas) in different roles are in touch with the offering and the service: Customer experience = experience of all these people. Experience is formed by

• The customer’s points of contact (digital, physical) with the brand (moments of truth)
• The service journeys
• The environments in which the first two bullets take place (ecosystems)

In this case, at F-Secure B2B/WithSecure, "the customer" meant both partners and end-customers.

Image: illustration of the customer experience ecosystem in B2B.

Creating products for the ideal partner (the focus customer)

When there are limits (e.g. in resources, time and money), there needs to be a focus. The focus will help in creating better offering to  the customer to serve them best. Understanding how they operate and build their services will help in that. For example: understanding what are the differences from a beginner to advanced partner, or what are their needs, pain-points and goals, and in the end what are the opportunities for us, the company who is providing the offering for them?

Identifying the key personas at ideal focus customer helps us to create them the optimal customer experience.

In B2B "generalizing" the personas or the profiles - in certain limits - is easier than in consumer business, because the certain behavior, needs, actions and responsibilities are defined by the professional role of the person. The roles in different companies are approximately the same or similar, for example an IT admin in certain sized company, in certain segment can have same definition and requirements. Of course there is variety and individual humans are always different, but some generic commonalities can be found, and for the rest, a certain imagined persona can help in empathizing. Anyways, it is good to start the customer understanding from somewhere, even if it would not be scientifically perfect. Our work was based on hypothesis, but there was always research and data behind. The point would be to have a concrete target, the human personas, to whom we are creating the products or services or communicating with.

What is meant by the profiles and personas

A profile provides a composite summary of a group of certain type of users. Their typical characteristics and role in the customer organization. There is always research/real data behind a profile and the generated profiles provide input to the persona descriptions. The major part of the identified personas were in level of a profile. Common persona "role types" were used to identify the main persona groups, the needs and motives: buyer, influencer, decision maker and the user. In B2B one human can have 1 or more of these persona roles in the company, especially if the company is small. For example same individual being both user and influencer.

We were able to create the key personas for the security management product based on the profiles gathered: the buyer persona, influencers and users. One persona document describes a representative (but fictional) individual. Generally, the personas consist of: Personal details like name, age, education, demographics and a picture, job title and main responsibilities, motives, drivers and goals, fears and pains. (Due to the confidentiality the details of personas are not included here.)

Image: illustration of general role types involvement on E2E journey phases.

Why personas are needed?

Personas are needed to understand who is using your company offering, when and how, and to improve their experience (= customer experience). Key personas help in having the focus and to prioritize use cases for the most relevant personas. Personas help in identifying the motives, needs and pain points: why and how the solution is used and could be used. They help in creating empathy and imagine experience of “real user”. Personas also help communications internally between the stakeholders inside the company. Having the same personas used in each function and operation in the company supports in unifying the the requirements and objectives.

Image: illustration of the ecosystem from a partner IT admin persona point of view.

How the focus customer and personas were used?

Often it happens that after the focus customer, personas and customer journey is created, the actual benefit, the usage of them does not fly in the organization. Taking the information in use requires willpower from different stakeholders in the organization and leadership from design to evangelize and show how to use them. In this case, at F-Secure B2B/WithSecure, luckily there were people in different functions who wanted to push the usage too. Me and my team helped the organization in applying the personas in the requirements creation, planning and design. Focus customer and partner personas were one of main elements in Partner Portal vision and Cyber Security product vision creation (more about those in another story), they were the core enablers for customer centric vision creation. The information was also used in defining and designing optimal partner onboarding journey.

We created internal information sharing pages in the company intranet and for example added the personas information in the product roadmap planning tool. For the Product Design team, for UX designers, we defined requirements and use cases from the focus customer and personas point of view and analyzed how those would impact in the product UI. We did empathy and need descriptions for the core visionary functions and UX concepts. Overall presenting the designs from the personas point of view should be the next step to bring the user and customer focus forward.

The hard part is to get each individual designer, developer and/or product manager to know the personas well and be able to empathize and imagine what they would go thru in different scenarios. This could be achieved by more hands on, persona focused  workshops and co-design, which would be lead by the service designer who knows the customer and personas by heart. The information and customer centricity cannot be transferred in one go, it requires everyone to work with them and dedicated service designers and design lead to drive it forward and keep it in the plans. Getting the customer and personas focus in the objectives and key results of everyone and all the functions in the company should be the target.