Hearts then Charts

HEARTS THEN CHARTS
Remember: abstraction, generalization, and mythology increase by orders of magnitude
the farther you get from the customer. To build more useful customer description, assemble
a team of people who interact with your customers every day. Sales associates, call center
staff, field technicians, and researchers are among the best sources of insights. Surround
them with people who can support the conversation with data and context. You’ll often
need participation from senior members of your organization. Remember, though, that they
carry the baggage of existing assumptions (and tend to drown out more junior members of
the team).
Success will be found in everyday conversations, rather than a moment of enlightenment.
A succinct description — and shared understanding — of your customers forms a basis for
more elaborate artefacts. They can set the stage for persona development by internal teams
or agency partners. More immediately, they allow members of your organization to ask
essential questions like:
‘Why would Nancy do that?’
Or:
‘Is this headline aimed at the DIY Dad? It seems off.’
These customer descriptions also act as guard rails. When a department or team outlines
a program aimed at a customer that the organization hasn’t defined, we’re presented with
a choice. On some occasions, we’ll identify a need to collectively define a new customer.
Other times, we’ll have the vocabulary to orient that team around an existing customer type.
Either way, we’ll have a tool that prevents our view of the customer from being arbitrary and
circumstantial.
When our views of people become tools that we can use to ask better questions, we get
closer to the customer.
Building an ongoing practice: Much as the quality revolution that took hold in Japan in the
1970s was predicated on the consistent application of basic techniques, sustained customer
focus hinges on accessible repetition.
At your scheduled monthly check-ins, focus on collecting feedback on a handful of simple
questions:
• Are the people we initially outlined still relevant to our most-pressing needs?
• Do our colleagues understand the customers we outlined?
• Are they using them? If not, what are the obstacles to getting this to happen?
• What detail can we add to these customer types that is both a.) true and b.) helpful?
You’ll want to schedule check-ins at 30 and 90 days from the kickoff to collect feedback.
These are also opportunities to identify areas that need more detail, or extraneous elements.
Collaborate on a plan to socialize these customer types across the organization. This can
take many forms, but the most effective is to simply begin using them in the normal course
of business. Include references to them in internal documents. Use them in conversation.
Reference them in presentations. When colleagues ask about them, take the time to explain
what they are and how they’re used. If you ‘reveal’ them, they become a trinket. If you use
them, they become a de facto tool of the enterprise. Repetition builds the muscle memory
that allows these to become useful.
© 2015 ALMIGHTY LLC | 8