Give Your Customer Service Team a Leg Up: Developing Buyer Personas

You may have heard about buyer personas, perhaps in reading about how to help your customer service team meet their goals.

But have you had trouble developing buyer personas and presening them to your customer service team?

If you haven’t strated, here is why you should.

When Skytap, a seller of solutions to cloud automation issues, started to use buyer personas, the traffic to their websites in North America went up by 210%. Oh, and their organic search traffic increased by 55%. And Skytap is not alone; research shows that 71% of companies who exceed their sales targets use buyer personas.

Well, it looks like you have some personas to create.

Let’s get fictional: What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is like an avatar that is created by piecing together information about the kind of human being that wants or needs your product or service. And, the more accurate and deep the data describing your buyer persona is, the more useful it will be to your customer service team.

So, where do you start?

The first step in building a buyer persona is to gather information about the persona. Remember, your persona represents a group of human beings that share some characteristics. Here's a list of questions to ask yourself when building your personas:

• Where does the persona live?
• Where does the persona not live?
• What gender is the persona?
• What is the persona’s relationship status?
• How old is the persona, roughly?
• How much money does the persona make?
• How educated is this persona?
• What interests does the persona have?
• What field does the persona work in?
• What kind of job titles does the persona have?
• What kind of websites does the person like?
• Why does the persona buy your product or service?
• Does the persona have concerns about buying your product or service? If so, what are they?

Now, how do I gather this information?

The best way for you to gather the data that will serve as the building blocks for your buyer persona is to speak with your buyers. But this is not the only way: You will likely use a mix of different techniques, and settle on two or three that work well for you:

• Interview existing customers
• Analyze your website traffic, using Google analytics
• Study your direct competitors, reading any reports or case studies they publish.
• Visit your direct competitor’s social media spaces, check out their customer’s profiles.
• Hang out in the LinkedIn groups that would likely appeal to your buyers, connect with people, ask questions and read discussions.
• If you don’t use Facebook ads already, you should start to. Facebook lets you target users by location, gender, relationship status and the kind of work they do, making it a perfect testing ground for your buyer persona. 

One more thing

Most companies develop more than one avatar, so a clever way to begin is with a buyer persona that captures the largest number of your buyers, and then work your way down. And remember, a happy customer service team has the best tools you can offer them.

At eShipper, customer experience is our number one priority. We always make sure that every single shipment is given the utmost care with the customer in mind. We offer several technologies to keep the customer informed and to make the eCommerce shopping experience a smooth and pleasant one. See how we can help bring your customer experience to the next level!