One of the earlier insights was The Compound Effect In Service Design, creating customer personas and going through your processes was a how to make it a wow idea in that insight.

A lot of you got in touch and wanted to know more, detail the thought, so here is a detailed insight on the same.

What Are Customer Personas?

A persona, (also user persona, customer persona, buyer persona) is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.

A traditional and common approach is the FIT, Group, MICE segmentation followed by hotels. For a different take user types, read this.

I like to think of it in terms of Customer Roles rather than Customer Segmentation. For example, the expectations and needs of someone hosting an event or gathering are very different than if they were attending that event. The person remains the same, the role changes.

How To Action This Insight

First, just make a simple table with all your processes as rows and your customer personas as columns.

Then, start developing micro-processes.  Micro processes are defined as small variations in a larger process that are defined for a particular need, location, time of day, situation etc.

Real-World Example

Check-In

Most hotels will already have a different check-in process for individuals and groups. Can we go deeper?

Let's look at two very accepted and robust customer persons used by most hotels - FIT-Individual & FIT-Family. Because you are a customer-sensitive organisation, you can do the following:

Wifi (if you have password-protected wifi or login/registration etc), give both the customer personas all the details (printed, in-room menu, services directory etc), but for the family, let them add multiple devices under one registration/user name & password. Every kid has their own device now and it can get a little frustrating to set that up for the entire family. This is creating solutions for a specific customer persona. Of course, if you are uber-luxury, you should have a digital concierge to do all this.  

Room Setup

The entire industry has some very well defined practices for room cleaning and set-up. Most hotels will have a special set up for honeymooners or special occasions.  Some will increase the bathroom amenities and towels if there is an extra bed or small family staying in a room.  For the MICE segment, hotels will place the schedule of events in the room. Hotels may also add little maps, details of important contacts and more. 

I share this only to highlight that our teams already know how to look after different customer personas. We just need to do more, go deeper. For example, can you think about how you could do up your room for a guest who identifies as a minimalist? What can you do for green-conscious travellers? 

Want to make this WOW?

Develop different Customer Service Story Boards for different customer personas.

This is a very powerful exercise that makes it easy for your teams to visualise the entire process with a very specific 'hero' of the process and a very well defined outcome.