Total CX

Why Are Customer Scenarios Important?

Understanding your customers’ scenarios—what they are trying to accomplish and how they ideally want to reach their goals—is critical to making it easy for them to do business with you. There are several types of Customer Scenarios:

• Customer Lifecycle Scenarios
• Event-Triggered Scenarios
• Outcome-Based Scenarios

Customer Lifecycle Scenarios. There are Customer Scenarios that are closely connected to customers’ discovery, acquisition, and use of your products and services to fulfill a need they have—we call these customer lifecycle scenarios[pbs1]. Examples include:

• Single mother needs to replace her broken washing machine
• Immigrant wants to establish a banking relationship in her new country
• Line-of-business manager wants to upgrade his team to the latest version of productivity software

Event-Triggered Scenarios. There are also Customer Scenarios that relate to life events or business events that customers need to deal with. For consumers, these might include:

• Young couple wants to buy a new house and move in
• Children want to plan and throw a 50th anniversary party for parents
• Couple needs to furnish a nursery for baby on the way

How Do You Create Customer Scenarios?

You can try to put yourselves in your customers’ shoes, start with a Persona (typically defined by your customer insights organization based on market research), put them in a particular context (leisurely planning, emergency situation, trying to get out of a fix, needing to build consensus before they can move forward, etc.), and use your own instincts to describe the customers’ typical conditions of satisfaction (e.g., I don’t want to work overtime on this project, I want my kids to think my choice is cool).

But the best approach is to get your customers to do the work. You’ll gain incredible insights about what really matters to them. They’ll define their ideal outcomes and metrics in ways that will surprise you. They’ll provide rich details about their situations that your product designers, policy-makers and/or business process mappers usually don’t appreciate.