At times it feels like defining your ideal customer persona is a never-ending process.
Individual customers change over time. Events impact them. They grow through their experiences. As a result, they change. Customers may even outgrow our products and services.
As your business grow things change too. You uncover how you can best serve customers. And you get a clearer picture of who you can serve best. You may grow by branching out to other segments or industry verticals.
So, you may revisit your customer personas again and again.
It’s all a learning process. A discovery.
Customer surveys often have a purpose of gathering feedback on how you do business. Like, taking a temperature of customer satisfaction or customer effort. And things like win/loss analysis to measure the effectiveness of sales.
As a result, surveys help to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
A discovery interview seeks a wider view of the customer. Sometimes beyond the boundaries of our business. What are their problems. Their aspirations.
Things you might only know from asking questions and listening. Possibly gained from an open-ended question on a survey. Certainly, much deeper and richer from a conversation. A conversation with a purpose.
When running discovery interview campaigns, I borrow questions that I use in my retrospective debriefs. It grew out of doing debriefs of discovery calls.
What did I learn? What still puzzles me?
Since it’s an ongoing campaign, planning the next call flows from the debrief of the last call. The ongoing answers to these questions.
“What did you learn” sets up questions that I want to confirm are true for other people as well? Seen a handful of times I then update the persona. Additionally, it can lead to identifying new segments. It becomes a source of information on changes to your messaging and offers.
“What still puzzles you” opens new questions. Or helps to reframe existing ones. It can influence the goals of other campaigns and inspire tactical experimentation.
Simple, yet powerful questions.
What still puzzles you about your customer?
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