Customer Behavior Modeling Can Drive Business Growth
MOTIVATION: What has put them into the market at this moment (e.g. special occasion, business need, personal desire, etc.)?
BUSINESS-SPECIFIC: Information specific to your type of business. (Energy: Does your home have gas or oil heat? Travel: Have you ever been on a cruise before? Sporting goods: What is your golf handicap?)
Once you have dimensional information, the next task is to decide which categories and dimensions are most relevant to your business. Do you currently use any of these dimensions today to influence the way you create your customer experience? Which dimensions will drive customer insights? It’s best to focus on 5 to 10 significant dimensions. This will allow you to maintain a balance between gaining insight and taking action.
Once you have analyzed customer categories and dimensions, and decided which customer types are most relevant to your business, the next step is to create personas. If you were a mobile phone company, one of your customer personas could sound like Sam:
Some of your customers may have similar personas, and some may be very different. Creating these personas will allow you to really focus and hone in on the full breadth of the categories and dimensions your current and prospective customers fall into.
Step 3: Writing Customer Stories
Once you have created customer personas, the next step is to determine which of the behavioral sequences you identified apply to each of your personas. Then you can start to write a story for each of your personas.
Stories elaborate on behavioral sequences and put them in the context of real-world scenarios in which your customer moves through the life cycle of awareness, consideration, purchase, support, re-purchase, and advocacy. Your customer stories should start by creating a vision for the optimal customer story (or stories) for each persona, and branch out from there.
Defining customer behaviors and identifying customer types are crucial steps in knowing your customers, and ultimately, writing customer stories. These stories will give you a clearer understanding of your customers, which will help facilitate product development and streamline product marketing processes.
Howard Tiersky is the president and founder of FROM. FROM is a full service digital strategy consulting company that has developed proprietary software to aid in the customer behavior modeling process.