Today, companies have access to more customer data than ever, but is this data being used effectively? Persona Pix is a new card game designed to encourage you to think differently about your customers and the habits, concerns, motivations, and life factors that influence their communications preferences. Done right, catering to individual preferences and behaviours comes with significant benefits to engagement and customer satisfaction.
If you’ve played Persona Pix, you’ll already be familiar with the scoring categories we’ve used to demonstrate the features and characteristics that influence the communications preferences of our personas: digital skills, loyalty, adaptiveness, and engagement. But why have we picked these scoring categories, and why do they matter when developing communications strategy?
Digital skills:
Over the past decade or more, customer communications have been moving increasingly online. While this is great for some customers, what does this mean for those without the skills to fully engage with digital communications?
From Analogue Anne to Five Phone Felix, Persona Pix features characters represent the full spectrum of digital skills. Understanding where your customers sit on this spectrum is key to delivering communications that really resonate.
However, as the game makes clear, understanding a customer’s level of comfort with digital technologies is not as simple as crude segmentation on the basis of age, for example. Research by the charity Age UK suggests that only 25% of 65-74 year olds rarely use the internet. While this rises to 54% in those aged over 75, it’s clear that the majority of pensioners are digital savvy, regular internet users.
Conversely, recent research reveals that only 51% of households earning between £6-10k had home internet access, suggesting that there may be many more Left Behind Leah’s who aren’t being effectively communicated with. As digital skills play a significant role in the success or failure of customer comms, understanding customer abilities is key to getting the approach right.
Loyalty:
With the vast number of price comparison sites available online, not to mention the discount prices often available to new customers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that customer loyalty is dead. In reality, this is far from the truth, and demographics (particularly age) make a real difference to loyalty.
A recent consumer loyalty study revealed that those aged 18-25 are particularly loyal, however this declines to a peak of shopping around when they reach late 30s and early 40s. Understanding how loyal a customer is, and their potential motivations for making a switch, are key to developing customer comms that resonate.
As well as understanding loyalty trends, it’s important to understand the reasons why a customer might make a switch. Believe it or not, price is far from the only trigger. For example, the 2019 Deloitte Millennial Survey reveals that millennials like Ethical Evie (alongside their younger cohorts in Gen. Z) will generally “patronise and support companies that align with their values; many say they will not hesitate to lessen or end relationships when they disagree with companies’ business practices, values, or political leanings”.
Ultimately, wherever a customer sits on the loyalty scale, understanding the triggers for a potential jump is crucial for developing communications that hit the mark.
Adaptiveness:
Adaptiveness really means how quickly a customer can adapt to change, whether that be a change in service, communication method, or service provider. Understanding how adaptive your customers are is key to understanding everything from their likelihood of embracing a new service, to the likelihood they’ll switch to a rival provider.
From Worried Walter, who’s fears being left behind, to Fortnite Finlay, who’s grown up with connected technology embedded in his life from birth, Persona Pix characters span the full breadth of adaptiveness. Understanding how quickly your customers are likely to embrace change is important in developing comms that resonate.
Ultimately, working out where your customers sit on this scale – and developing communications accordingly – relies on effectively harnessing the data you already have, and combining with effective testing and systems to facilitate quick changes in both data sets and communication messaging.
Engagement:
In an ideal world, all customers would be fully engaged with the communications they receive. However, a quick look at the open rates of any customer comms will reveal that we don’t live in an ideal world.
Engaged or not, understanding how invested a customer is in the communications you send them can reveal a lot about their communications preferences. In the Persona Pix game, you’ll meet everyone from Stickler Steve, who always reads the small print, to Forgetful Fred, who needs regular reminders to check his account or pay his bills.
Developing effective messaging and understanding the optimum frequency of customer comms relies on understanding a customer’s unique behaviours. Some companies already have the data they need to do this, but aren’t yet harnessing it effectively.
Ultimately, the scoring categories used in Persona Pix represent just a fraction of the individual character traits and abilities that inform a customer’s communications preferences. To discover how Paragon can help you better understand your customers and deliver communications that really resonate, get in touch.
