Build Organizational Empathy Through Personas

Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings for another

Is your business empathic? If like me, you’ve read Joel Bakan’s 2003 book The Corporation, you may have a bleak perspective on the answer to that question. In his book, Bakan lays out a very compelling case that corporations are, by their very nature, psychopathic. So, can a business truly be empathic?

Yes it can. And it starts with fully understanding your customer by moving from a set of demographic data to a fully fleshed-out archetype with hopes, fears, and motivations.

Look at wildly successful companies such as Apple, Google and Audi; they are in the empathy market. They understand and anticipate their customer’s needs, sometimes before their customers know what they are. Empathy is also profitable. You can draw a straight line from empathy to the bottom line. If you’re curious, Lady Geek publishes an annual empathy index. Check out the 2015 list here.

Your business or product exists to fill a fundamental gap – something that your customer needs to be or do better. Our universal tendency is to get wrapped up in a list of our product’s features; what we should focus on are the problems we solve for our clients.

A mainstay of today’s marketing machine, personas are something you’ve probably read about; you may have even started your own. I like Tony Zambito’s definition of personas from more than a decade ago:

Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, where they buy, when buyers decide to buy, and why they make buying decisions.

However, it’s one thing to understand what personas are and quite another to create and refine them over time. What’s important is that if you haven’t given them your attention you start, now. They provide your company with a focus for empathic decision making. Here’s a very simple recipe for creating a buyer persona.

1. Define or narrow down your focus. Most businesses have more than one persona. Instead of trying to figure out how many personas you need at this stage, approach this exercise from the standpoint of a particular problem or priority area, vertical or product offering in your mix.

2. Gather qualitative feedback. Often people assume that this will be the most difficult information to pull together. What many fail to realize is that you already have a treasure trove of firsthand information about your clients at your disposal. Pull together cross-disciplinary feedback from across your organization. Find out what sorts of questions your sales or customer service teams get asked again and again. And yes, you may want to engage in one-on-one customer interviews.

3. Gather quantitative data. Pull marketing and website analytics, CRM data, sales pipeline data, industry data, any data to help you fill in the picture of who your clients are. If you don’t have a lot of data at this point, don’t get discouraged. If you are missing big chunks of insight into who your customers are, then aim to find a way to narrow that gap.

4. Start filling in the picture. HubSpot has created a great road map of 20 questions to ask when generating a persona. Here is HubSpot’s step-by-step online tool, if you want a guided exercise. For a B2B persona, you want to step into that person’s shoes in a given role at a company. Instead of Mary, the individual, you’ll be creating a picture of Mary, the law firm IT director, or Bob, the paralegal.   However, if you find that personal details and information about who they are outside of work are relevant, by all means, include those too.

5. Refine, refine, refine. Personas are living, breathing organisms. They are never done. The idea is to create the beginning of your ideal customer’s story and then optimize this story over time with more qualitative and quantitative data.

Personas can help inform marketing tactics, messaging, website copy, the customer journey and even product decisions. While some companies get caught up in robot-like marketing around their personas, personas are simply meant to be one tool in your toolbox, a tool that helps drive a much better understanding of your clients across your organization.


About the author
Kim Tidwell is an account manager with Edge Legal Marketing. She has more than 15 years of experience with brand development, retail product development and both outbound and inbound marketing. In her spare time, she loves to run in Austin’s Hill Country, and enjoys cooking and yoga.

CX and Your Website: The 8-Second Rule - by Kim Tidwell @ Edge Marketing

Are you familiar with the term customer experience (CX)? Not just for app developers or folks operating on the fringes of innovation, CX is a pervasive value system that will affect your company’s success. So what exactly is CX? I like Forrester’s definition for its simplicity:

“How customers perceive their interactions with your company.”

Anytime you interact with a customer, whether it is online, in person or over the phone, you are engaging in forming customer experience – good, bad or ugly. Most of us, apparently, feel that we are doing a good job – only, we are not.

According to Bain & Company, 80 percent of CEOs believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers agree. How do companies go about bringing those two numbers closer together? When it comes to your first chances to nurture positive CX – your website and social media profiles – it is important to set your brand ego aside.

Think about this:

“There are only 86,400 seconds in a day. Given that we are universally bound by this limited resource, how can we make things easier, quicker and simpler for our customers?”

This question, posed by MGM Resorts International’s chief experience officer, Julie Hoffmann, at the American Marketing Association’s National Conference in September, is one that you should ask regularly.

In addition, here are two exercises you can do today to positively impact the online customer experience you provide.

How would you describe your organization and its services or products to a 10-year-old?

Visit your website home page. Without scrolling, does it answer this question in under eight seconds? The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a recent study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds.

If a first-time visitor sees only your clever brand tagline, then it is time to make one critical change on your home page. Add a succinct single-line message that communicates your value proposition. A quick web search turned up these examples of effective home page value messages:

·         The easy, fast, affordable way to send money online – from your desktop, tablet or mobile device.

·     Comprehensive, easy-to-use cloud-based law practice management software.

·         Software for automated sales tax compliance. “Sales tax is hard. We make it easy.”

That value message will help visitors confirm their interest in your product or service. Make sure this simple description also lives on your social media profiles.

Within the first eight seconds, visitors should also see one or more simple, low-risk ways to engage with you. An opt-in subscription form, download offer or free trial may extend the visit well beyond eight seconds.

What are the top five questions your prospective customers ask you?

You are sitting on the most valuable insights money can buy – actual customer interactions. Ask your sales team to account for the questions they continually get asked by prospects at the beginning of the relationship. Do you address these questions on your website’s most important pages? How many pages and links does it take to get the answers? Your customers are coming to your website to figure out if you provide a solution for their pesky, nagging pain point. Is there a way to provide relief in fewer interactions?

Sometimes, particularly with B2B, we get caught up in trying to deliver so much information that the most customer-relevant part gets lost or left out. You do not need a new website to make real strides in your CX. Real improvements can result from simply creating headlines and separating blocks of copy and important callouts with more white space.

Your brand is not just a tagline, a collection of bright colors and a logo. Ultimately, your true brand is your customers’ experience of your company over the duration of their relationship with you. Your website is a prominent part of that, so start your CX initiative there.