Customer profiling is a way of creating portraits of your customers that are based on factual information, such as their buying behaviours or customer service interactions. These aren’t meant to replace traditional demographics but are used to complement them as you work with customer touchpoints. Some of the main profiling systems use customer postcodes to generate the groups or segments that customers are likely to fall into and from this, the characteristics that they are likely to have.

A Customer Persona is a fictitious model of an ideal customer. It generally includes demographics (age, gender, location, and occupation) as well as psychographics (motivations, likes, dislikes, and pain points).

Customer profiling using an existing customer database or data sub-set

Customer profiling can be used to add value to existing datasets such as a customer database or a data sub-set such as the respondents to a particular survey.

For example, in addition to the research data we obtain from a Visitors’ Survey to an attraction or event, we can tag the data by consumer classifications to provide a view of the types of people who have attended, their characteristics and behaviours. This also gives a view on where there is under-representation in particular groups and where there may be potential for future growth. We do this by taking the postcodes of the respondents and running these through a recognised consumer classification provider such as CACI Acorn.

Testing customer personas

As customer personas are largely fictional, research can be used to test the assumptions that have been used in the creation of these personas. By using a subset of the customer database, we can run focus groups or quantitative surveys to determine if the characteristics ascribed to the customers are largely correct before these are used for targeting or marketing purposes.

We have experience of providing both of these services, so if you want help with profiling your customers or testing your customer personas, please contact us.