Creating Support Personas: A Tool for Elevating your Customer Support
Without a doubt, customer support can be a game-changer for customer loyalty. In my experience as a support manager, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of tailoring the support processes to the needs of each customer as a way to enhance the support experience. An effective way to achieve this is by creating support personas - fictional, data-driven representations of your customers that can help your support team better understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. In this post, I’ll detail how I create these personas based on the organization’s customer personas and how they can benefit both your users and your support team. I’ll also provide a practical example for three support personas.
Anatomy of a support persona
Briefly put, a support person is a representation of a specific customer segment that your support team interacts with. Dividing your users based on their needs, characteristics, and preferences can allow you to better understand and address their unique requirements. The key components of a support persona include expectations, pain points, and communication preferences.
Steps to create effective support personas
If available, you can gather and analyze data from your existing customer base. Surveys, interviews, and other analytical tools can provide invaluable insights in the needs and preferences and allow you to identify patterns that you can use in the development of the personas. I prefer to build the personas starting from the organization’s customer personas. By focusing on the aspects that I can relate to support experiences, I can tailor the support approach to better address the needs of each segment. This process includes:
Creating an overview of the persona - Begin by developing a brief description of your persona, highlighting their characteristics and needs.
Defining the support mission - Establish a clear mission statement that outlines how your support team will empower the users in each segment.
Outlining the persona’s expectations from support - What are the specific expectations that individuals from a specific segment have when contacting support? What is their preferred communication style?
Identifying any relevant information - This can include preferred method of communication, their familiarity with your products, etc.
Sharing and collaborating with your team - To effectively implement the personas, it’s critical to communicate them to your support team and integrate them into your support processes. Encourage collaboration and welcome feedback.
Continuously refine your support personas - It’s essential to update these based on customer feedback and data to make sure they remain accurate and useful.
By utilizing support personas, your team can offer personalized and effective support experiences such as:
Tailored communication styles and techniques
Anticipating needs and challenges, allowing them to provide proactive solutions
Support Personas Example
Organization overview: The company offers a wide range of household electronics devices, including essential appliances and smart home solutions. The in-house dedicated support team is committed to providing efficient assistance for every customer.
