What is a Persona?
According to Michael Hinshaw, President, McorpCX, a persona is a stand-in for customers who share common traits and attitudes. Essentially, a “straw model” for a customer segment, where one set of characteristics represents the bigger group. And while a persona represents a segment, it is also a ‘behavioral archetype’ of an individual customer distilled into the description of a person.
Widely used in User Experience (UX) for years, personas have been an increasingly important part of Customer experience design. According to the San Francisco-based company, the practice of using persona first took root in software and the value of developing customer personas has proven measurable and significant to organizations that use it.
As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for developing and managing customer persona, Persona by McorpCX claims to allow users to create personas together in collaboration with teams. And reportedly automates the currently manual process of developing, managing and sharing persona across corporations.
Hinshaw was quoted saying, “Personas are a core component to customer experience management and we’re exceedingly pleased to bring this product to market. Now we can provide clients with a digital solution to create, manage and share personas and further build upon McorpCX’s customer experience platform.”
“We continue to develop our suite of SaaS solutions with the goal to further automate many of the high-value CX tasks and initiatives that we believe customer-centric organizations around the world do less efficiently today,” he added.
The product follows suit after McorpCX’s customer experience offerings including its existing technology, Touchpoint Mapping on Demand, a cloud-based customer experience research and analytics platform. The company also packs features like Actionable Metrics, something it likes to call ‘hard metrics to the soft science of measuring customer perceptions’ to enhance customer engagement and retention. Additionally, Persona used as a solution could boost sales or strategy development and bring aboard tailored, customer-centered interface.
Lynn Davison, COO, McorpCX, also commented:
We believe McorpCX Persona will add significant value to the process of developing and managing personas. The process has always been resource intensive, and creating a standardized system for socializing personas across an organization is tough. Since persona are proven to drive better ROI across areas including marketing strategy, software design and sales enablement in addition to customer experience, we’re really excited to see where this product can take its users.”
The product launch looks like a subsequent step after McorpCX decided to acquire PersonaDrive, earlier in June. The Bellevue headquartered provider of cloud-based productivity software was bought for an undisclosed amount to broaden McorpCX’s services and platform, and simplify persona management for clients.
