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
For business people, these scenarios may include things like:
- Product marketing manager wants to coordinate activities for a new product launch
- Operations manager needs to coordinate the move to a new set of offices
- HR director needs to arrange for employee benefits and job counseling as his company downsizes
Outcome-Based Scenarios. Some scenarios are focused on a specific outcome, for example:
- Young woman is determined to lose 20 pounds before her high school reunion
- A customer service representative wants to learn Spanish in order to receive a promotion
- Executive wants to improve revenues by 20 percent while retaining or improving current profit margins within 12 months.
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