CX Club – Round 10 – Profiling & Segmentation – Are most CX activities intellectual masturbation?

CX Club Round 10 Profiling & Segmentation
Profiling & Segmentation

Ian Williams from Jericho and Steve Sullivan from Channel Doctors discuss the importance of profiling & segmentation in Customer Experience Transformation.

Profiling & segmentation are widely spoken about in the Customer Experience world, but there is little integration between these data-driven exercises and the typical Customer Experience practices of Personae Building, Customer Journey Mapping and Transformation.

Unless Personae Building, Customer Journey Mapping and Transformation activities are tied back to individual customer profiles, how can the company set up data-driven treatment strategies? (Hint: they cant!). They are simply paper exercises/ intellectual masturbation.

Without that connection between profiles and personae (e.g. where psychographic personae have been evolved as theoretical exercises without the use of data), when a new customer comes along, how does the organisation decide which personae that customer belongs to? (Hint: they can’t!)

This video talks about successful CX programmes develop accurate customer profiles, from which behavioural strategic customer segments are derived (via machine learning unsupervised clustering), which are then evolved into personae, which are used to drive customer journey mapping exercises identifying pain points, moments of truth, commercial opportunities and wow opportunities, which form the basis of relevant CX transformation activities and customer treatment strategies.

Furthermore, we talk about how we get the organisation to accept these strategic customer segments and use them alongside their existing functional customer segmentation approaches. You don’t have to do one or the other, you can do both and improve both functional and strategic business performance.

The things we hear from clients are along the lines of:

“How can we provide a consistent experience across our business when every function works differently?”

“Marketing have created these customer personas, but how do we decide which customer belongs to which persona?”

“We have lots of data about our customers, but how do we use it to personalise their experiences?”

“We have six main customer segments/ personae, but only one customer journey. How does that work?”

“We did some journey mapping, but nothing happened after that. What are we missing here?”

“If we can solve these problems, how can we then maintain future customer experience performance?”

“How can we use customer profiles for data driven customer treatment strategies by segment/ persona?”

This video helps to answer all of the above.