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CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS ON EMOTION Marketing based on personas is outdated. Businesses should act on data suggesting the emotional moment a customer is in. By Lucidworks ANZ Head of Engineering Jag Dhillon. usinesses continually use customer or buyer personas to gain an understanding of their target audience. The idea is that these personas represent a large segment of an organisation’s audience based on the information collected from research and analytics. For example, a supermarket may develop a persona by the name of ‘Maddison’, a stay-at-home mum in charge of the day-to-day running of the household, including the buying of groceries. The problem with customer personas is that they’re desperately outdated. Originally developed in 1983 by a software company, they haven’t evolved much since. While a number of people might fit a description similar to that of ‘Maddison’, the various personalities, traits and emotional moments of each individual aren’t taken into account. The persona concept doesn’t allow consumers to be unique. The role of personas Customer personas do have a role to play. They’re a great first step for marketers to put themselves in the shoes of their customers. But that’s just one step. The purchasing process isn’t always a straight road, with shoppers often taking many detours as they shop, evaluate, purchase and use products. Instead of focusing on personas, businesses should be on the lookout for emotional moments instead. Emotional connection Consider ‘Maddison’, who’s just realised she’s out of baby formula and is desperate for more before she needs to feed her daughter. As she lands on a supermarket’s website, she won’t be perusing for the latest sales. She’ll head straight to the search bar. In this frantic state, she’d love a bit of help from the supermarket to point her in the right direction. In order to personalise the customer experience, organisations must think less about mapping a journey and more about gathering data on the customer to figure out the ‘moment’ they’re in. Based on information the supermarket has collected, it should be able to determine that ‘Maddison’ has a young baby and will soon be due for more formula (given she hasn’t bought any recently). Thus the data needed to make a relevant suggestion to the customer’s emotional moment is provided. Keyword searches aren’t enough It’s not enough to just rely on keywords. If customers don’t find what they’re looking for in the first search, they’re likely to give up and try a competitor. The issue with keyword search is the customer needs to type the word/s exactly as the organisation has presented them. Misspellings and/ or synonyms are not accounted for. This is where an AI-powered search tool is essential. Determining intent Organisations can determine what moment a person is in by using customer signals such as what that person clicks on, what they don’t click on, what they search for and how they write queries. By combining machine learning and customer signals, the supermarket can determine that when ‘Maddison’ types “baby formla”, she means “baby formula”, and provide the relevant results despite her error. Personas have taken marketing teams far, but in today’s digital world, they’ve reached the end of the line. It’s time for organisations to invest in modern technologies that collect customer information such as signals, allowing them to better adapt to the buyer’s emotional moments and truly deliver a personalised experience. INDUSTRY INSIGHT About Jag Dhillon Jag Dhillon is Head of Engineering ANZ at Lucidworks. Throughout his career of more than 15 years, he has worked with leading technology vendors in various solution consulting roles. In his current role at Lucidworks, he works closely with customers on delivering AI-powered search solutions. About Lucidworks Lucidworks builds AI-powered search solutions for many of the world’s largest brands. Fusion, Lucidworks’ advanced development platform, provides the enterprise-grade capabilities needed to design, develop, and deploy intelligent search applications at any scale. Companies across all industries, from consumer retail and healthcare to insurance and financial services, rely on Lucidworks every day to power their consumer-facing and enterprise search apps. JUN, 2020 RETAIL WORLD 21