Personas: The Path to Customer Insight
In my recent post Four Keys to Business Success, I wrote that:
"A focus on people means that we have to move beyond basic benefits of our products and services. We have to understand how using our products or services changes the lives of customers."
The best way to incorporate how you change customers' lives into your business culture is to create customer personas. Personas describe the physical, intellectual, emotional, aspirational, mundane, needs and more of your customers. These descriptions - based on observation and research - drive a consistent understanding of your customers throughout your entire organization.
B2B & B2C Becoming P2P: People to People
In my recent post Four Keys to Business Success, I wrote that:
"B2C and B2B need to function more like P2P (as in People to People) companies."
There are major forces driving the shift to P2P on both the customer and business sides.
Customer Side
Four Ideas for Business Success
The Age of the Customer requires businesses to develop discipline around four strategic and operational areas. There's no time to wait, there's little time for discussion, there's only time to get busy.
This space will focus on these ideas for the next couple of months. Here they are:
1. B2C and B2B Must Become P2P
A Customer Centric Auto Body Shop - No Kidding
Imagine you're about to walk into the waiting area of a body shop. What's the first image that comes to mind?
Dirt? Grease? Noise? What waiting area? Some dark, post-apocalyptic movie scene?
Happily there are those in the auto collision repair industry who are awakening to the power and value of putting the customer at the center of their business strategy. There's a revolution starting in the industry and it's having a profound impact for early proponents.
Auto collision repair shops are making these changes based on the principles of Lean Production. I'll spare you the details but suffice it to say that Lean starts with identifying value from the customer perspective and eliminates whenever possible anything that doesn't create value. Customers should also be able to receive value throughout the auto collision repair experience.
Here's a brief case study about the positive impact for car owners.
