I started reading The Persona Lifecycle by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin over the past week, all 700 plus pages. The book provides a detailed overview of how to use personas, though mostly focused on interactive applications such as web design and software. I cannot review the whole book here, largely because of its length, but also because it does not seem like a book the authors designed for people to read through. It is more like a nicely woven set of concepts, practical insights, and toolkits around the topic of personas. In addition, it provides five original contributions, as individual chapters, by well-known authorities in user centered design. Read the rest of this entry »
Personas and Market Segmentation
June 9, 2006
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Brands, Customer Experience, Experience Design, User Experience | Tagged: Customer Segmentation, Experience Design, Persona | 
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Posted by Larry Irons
Customer Experience Management vs. Self-Orientation
January 3, 2006“The best companies find ways to tune in to customers’ voices every day,” The Three “Ds” of Customer Experience…
Focusing on how to engage customers in dialogue, how to converse with customers is among the greatest challenges, and opportunities, facing companies today. Conversing with customers requires a focus on their experience with existing products and services as well as the design of new ones. It means developing business processes to deliver products and services that are not self-oriented, but customer-oriented; not inside-out, but outside-in.
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a term used by many people to describe the methods for developing customer-orientation instead of self-orientation in business processes. CEM is one of those terms offering something to lots of different people. As a result, it is sometimes confused with the very services it claims to offer management advice on applying. A recent series of posts on LivePath provide an interesting discussion on what makes CEM different from CRM, User Experience Design, and Experiential Marketing. If you employ these buzz words in describing the services your company offers, I strongly encourage a close reading of these posts by Leigh Duncan. Although I might quibble with some of the distinctions made within each functional area of CEM that Leigh outlines, the overall strategy for making sense of what CEM offers is sound.
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1 Comment | Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Innovation | Tagged: CEM, CRM, Customer Experience Management, user experience | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Open Innovation, Self-orientation, and Customer Dialogue
November 1, 2005Booz, Allen, Hamilton recently reported on their Global Innovation 1000 research in “Money Isn’t Everything.” We briefly mentioned the report here. However, the findings are significant enough that an indepth discussion is needed.
So, why do I think the findings of the research are significant? Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments | Brands, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Innovation | Tagged: customer dialogue, Customer Experience, Innovation, product development, R&D | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Break the Golden Rule with Customer Dialogue Support
October 25, 2005A customer dialogue approach to customer support differs from traditional service models in at least one critical way. The most basic difference is that a customer dialogue approach insists that businesses perform better in the market when they minimize the self-orientation of their business processes and maximize their customer-centeredness. Yet, a customer-centered business strategy requires more than being nice to customers. Read the rest of this entry »
5 Comments | Customer Experience | Tagged: customer dialogue, Customer Experience | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
