How we Build Personas at Rise Strategy

At Rise Strategy we believe that the customers comes first and we strive to understand the needs and requirements of our customers. Understanding the requirements of the customer is one of our core values as it enables us to build products according to the requirements of our customers.

Understanding the needs and requirements of the customer is easier said than done and we at Rise Strategy utilize our User Experience team to break down our customers into distinct personas based on their backgrounds and skill. This can help us understand their requirements and enable us to provide them with better quality of service.

The following three are some of the lessons we learned by characterizing our customers into distinct personas.

• Challenge the already established knowledge.

• A combination of qualitative and quantitative data is the best way to go.

• Keep in touch with the company.

Challenging Already Established Knowledge

Rise Strategy is a customer oriented company and we have a lot of interaction with our customers therefore, we had ample knowledge regarding our customers when we began our project of building personas of our customers. We asked our colleagues to provide their quality feedback regarding our customers and got a very positive feedback. After deeply studying the feedback from our colleagues, we realized a flaw in it which is, that the feedback seemed to be biased towards a certain group of customers as compared to others.

This seemed to be an involuntary process and we realized that we create this bias unintentionally, maybe by focusing more towards a certain group of customers as compared to another while normally interacting with them. As the researchers were not immune to this unintentional cognitive bias therefore, we devised a process through which we could correct this bias in our customers.

A perfect example which would help us explain this bias in our customers is that previously it was considered that we only have two distinct customer bases; marketers and developers. After the collection of data, we realized that there exists a third customer base which is comprised of marketers who know how to code but are not that experienced that they would call themselves developers. We realized a whole new front of customers which had to be satisfied and this was progress. Despite few assumptions which needed correction, it was realized that our colleagues had a strong sense regarding our customers and they were mostly right.

Combination of Qualitative and Quantitative Data

The cliché is to build customer personas using either qualitative or quantitative data but at Rise Strategy we beat clichés and our research team of User Experience believe in the synergy of qualitative and quantitative data and we built our customer personas by combining a quantitative survey with two rich qualitative studies.

The first process of building the persona of our customers was realizing the internal knowledge in the company regarding our customers. The second step which we deemed necessary was to conduct interviews with our customers in order to gather information from them which we could use to form personas. We put aside our hypothesis regarding the personas of our customers during the interviews in order to avoid any bias and allowed our customers take charge of the interviews and enabled them to discuss their experience of Rise Strategy with us.

The interviews had no strict format and this was the reason it took considerable effort to determine the trends in our customers and then build personas based on these trends. Nonetheless, we were able to narrow down the trends by building certain personas while utilizing these trends but these trends were supported by insufficient data.

In order to strengthen our hypothesis regarding the trends in our customers, we sent out a survey to a couple hundred of our customers and then analyzed the information gathered from the survey using k-means cluster analysis. This analysis helped us by analyzing the newly formed personas and determining whether they are backed by rigid data or not.

Keep in Touch with the Company

Other researchers suggested consistently that teaching the people working in the company regarding the personas of their customers is necessary and this task should not be left to be completed in the end as it can lead to resistance in change and the workers may feel indifferent regarding the findings of the research.

To make our coworkers feel involved in the research we constantly socialized with them and informed them regarding the findings of the research as it went on. To make the coworkers feel more involved in the conversations we discussed with them their perspective regarding the personas of the customers and then explained to them, the necessity of personas.

This was just the start and it made the workers of the company feel more involved in the conversation regarding personas and it enabled them to understand the project and its outcomes. The different departments of the organization were provided with detailed presentations and informed about the implications of the research and how they can utilize personas to perform their work in a better and more efficient manner.

By giving presentations to different departments of the company, each employ heard about the research on personas and understood what this meant for them and how it could be used in their regular work. By spreading awareness regarding personas of our customers, we increased the chance of acceptance of personas across the company.

As suggested before, involving more and more workers in the research enabled it to be readily accepted in the organization and adopted in the regular routine this was in contrast to the other companies which had left education regarding the research at the last.

Conclusion

So after all this effort and discussion, were our personas successfully integrated in our organization? The answer to this question lies in whether the people in the company are using the personas in their regular work. Are they using personas to discuss customers and use personas to find new ways to attract customers?

The answered would yes to the question whether personas were integrated in the organization. At Rise Strategy, we work while keeping the customer in the perspective and this enabled a successful integration of personas into our regular operations. Personas were proven an effective tool for increasing the efficiency of our operations and we learned a lot in the process of establishing personas.