Persona Non Grata

The use of personas (I would prefer to say personae, but I keep getting corrected) in our UX and CX design work has always confused me. More recently, it has started to annoy me. Why replace perfectly good, real, human customers that we've spoken to and continue to speak to, with generalized approximations? Isn't this creating exactly the kind of abstraction that leaves room for misinterpretation and misrepresentation? As much as I've come to know and love Jane Doe and Joe Bloggs, frankly, they strike me as somewhat pliant and a little too enthusiastic with all our design decisions.

Admittedly, real customers are a little harder to pigeon hole, a little less logical, a little unwieldy with their requirements, considerably more opinionated, they aren't even always right, but they do have one very important advantage, they are... em... well, customers dammit! They are of course diverse, but not so diverse that any persona we create, cannot be replaced with 2 or 3 representative real-live customers. Customers also tend to come with working phone numbers and email addresses, so they can actually engage in the design process.

We've gone on a Customer Experience Journey mapping trip in my company over the past year or so. It struck me as so strange to replace the sources who were real people with amalgams and substitutes. Other than maybe dealing with confidentiality (so of course change the names), the effect seemed to be little more than diluting the impact of the journey maps we had created. Quoting a real customer, complete with expletives and directions on where we could stick our processes, somehow seemed so much more compelling, and considerably harder to argue with.

Somewhat contentiously in my own company, I've concluded the advantages served up by carefully crafted persona, are quickly outweighed with the dynamic and sometimes random input of real customers. The earlier they are brought into the design process the better, because let's face it, what we can actually change when we get to testing is pretty limited. I see only two potential exceptions: when the product is so competitively advantageous that we do not want it to leak out before we launch; the processes and policies we want to create, will not make sense to a real customer without the context of other changes too difficult to explain. I have encountered neither of these exceptions so far in my CX design work that focuses primarily on our business practices, policies and processes.

Be great, be authentic, keep it real!

Online CX Resources

There are a lot of great resources online for all things Customer Experience. However, which ones are the good ones? I thought maybe a community-curated list might be a useful tool. Add to it, vote on any of the existing recommendations, or comment on an item with a little more detail on what its strengths are. If you follow me on Twitter or Google+, and I'll send regular updates on additions, or sites that are community favorites. Thank you for making this list useful.

Click here for instructions on how to post this list on your own blog.



Still haven't found what you are looking for? Check out Annette Franz' CX Blog Roll on her excellent blog, CX Journey.

The Disservice of Customer Service

"Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us." - Jeff Bezos

Of course Jeff is talking about the intuitive, convenient, self-service nature of amazon.com (see full interview here). Working for a product company, I completely buy this philosophy. None of our customers purchased our products such that they would need to search our website, or contact us to resolve issues or help them use the product. Each and every time they do, we are already reacting to a problem, a problem they should never ideally encounter. It seems that if one is to truly take Customer experience to it's inevitable conclusion, the right level of customer service for any company, other than a service company, is clearly none at all.

Of course, we need to be there to catch our customers, it is impossible to be 100% fool-proof. Amazon realize this too, and in fact they have great customer service when you need it, which is rare, and so likely a very cost effective solution too. The challenge is that, it is a very thin line between developing a customer service function that is a rarely required, but highly effective safety net; and providing a crutch to allow for inferior product usability, and/or business processes and policies. Very few companies get this and indeed Jeff can be justifiably proud of how effective amazon.com has become in creating such a simple, intuitive and problem-free experience. It is quite likely, the most convenient ecommerce website ever, handling almost every eventuality in a slick intuitive manner.

Amazon.com have been very careful in making sure that it is the need to access customer service that is removed, and not the access itself. It is in fact quite easy to access customer service on Amazon.com, and extremely pleasurable, just not required. Working for a product company, I would be so bold as to declare that a key measure of successful experience design, be it UX or CX, be it the product itself or the company's business practice, should be our effectiveness in allowing a customer to get up and running, get proficient and stay proficient in using our products with zero interaction with our great customer service teams. Achieving that measure at as close to 100% as possible, would truly be a guarantee of a great experience!