5 Types of Customers You Need to Know In 2023 & How to Win Them Over

There was a time when people’s routine and behaviour was predictable. Just like clockwork. Most customers would work tirelessly over the weekdays and engage in recreational activities and seek to spend time with family and friends over the weekends; few others would utilise the time over the weekends to stock their supply of essentials.  

This was before the pandemic-induced lockdown put a hard-stop to life and routine as we know it. A new world order emerged after the curtain of pandemic lifted.  

Let us figure out how businesses can continue to evolve in 2023 to attract and retain customers. ‍

Why Businesses Must Determine Customer Personas

Irrespective of the industry your business operates in when it comes to attracting new customers and enhancing the customer experience, it all boils down to how well you know your customers and understand their pain points.  

As a growing business, thousands of customers will come to you for answers regarding your products, services, after-sale queries, and other support related questions; how you deal with each one of them determines the customer satisfaction score and the buck stops at your bottom line.  

A business needs to get granular about each customer's details, and the best way to do this is by creating customer personas.‍

What Is a Customer Persona?

A customer persona refers to the creation of fictional profiles that represent specific target customers from your audience. By segmenting your target audience, you can understand the distinct types of customers, their needs, concerns, challenges, passions, and buyer motivations. A customer persona does not refer to an actual person - it is a profile created based on insight, data and research gathered from real customers who visit your business’s website or have purchased products and services from you. Customer personas make it more efficient for brands and businesses to appeal to a customer's specific needs and wants; it also allows businesses to understand how to communicate with customers, which touchpoints to prioritise, etc.  

• Customer Profiles Lead to Better Business Decisions

Your business needs to determine customer personas as it allows you to differentiate your customers, right from a sales and marketing perspective to customer support and even product development. Creating customer profiles allows you to identify pain points that need to be solved, and helps you make informed business decisions about how you can support your customers better, be it from a communication or product design perspective.  

• Personalisation Sets Your Business Apart

Think about this - are you more likely to purchase products from a website that offers you personalised recommendations derived from your taste or style, or from one that offers generic recommendations, or worst yet, no recommendations?  

While the generic recommendations may be somewhat helpful (e.g., a clothing website that offers deals on winter jackets), a specific and personalised recommendation (e.g., the same clothing website offering recommendations on blue winter coats in a specific cut, based on your past search history) goes a long way in retaining the customer from a business perspective.  

• Creating Customer Persona Adds a Lot of Business Value

Whether you're a small business, or a larger established business, creating customer personas is helpful at any point in the business's growth trajectory, especially since customers and their needs keep evolving. Reviewing customer personas frequently allows your brand to identify and tackle new challenges in the market, tap into customer desires, and even figure out how to enhance products. The better you know your customers, the more value-based experiences you can offer.

‍5 Types of Customer Personas

Understanding and identifying your customers is key to any great business strategy as it helps a business understand which customers to target and where, how to target them, and which touchpoints to use to communicate with them. To achieve customer satisfaction, it is key to identify and invest resources in creating customer personas.

Each type of customer persona exhibits different interaction preferences. Brands need to use this information to design customer experiences that align themselves with each customer's specific requirements. When a brand understands the type of customers it is dealing with, it can easily alter the strategies it uses, in real-time. This helps in retaining customers and reaching out to them using their preferred mode of communication.

A study commissioned by CINNOX of 1,200 customers from various levels of society across Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore highlights the importance of delivering a personalised experience that accounts for different customers’ interaction preferences across the customer lifecycle.

‍
‍1. Multichannel Enthusiasts‍

Multichannel customers comprise of working adults falling within the age bracket of 20 to 49 years old. They lay equal emphasis on both digital, and human touchpoints. From a brand's perspective, it becomes easier for it to interact with the customers through both direct and indirect means, to target and motivate them to make a purchase. However, it is important to note that multichannel enthusiasts prefer maintaining a single touchpoint for communication with the brand. So, if your business is redirecting customers from one channel to another to resolve their enquiries, you may need to tighten your process.  ‍

2. Reserved Digital Immigrants‍

Reserved digital immigrants typically constitute of adults who are 50 years and above, including lower-income holders, and a handful of retired individuals. As the name suggests, the individuals falling under this profile prefer human touchpoints to digital channels, as they believe digital channels require switching between multiple apps before they can arrive at an optimum solution. Reserved digital immigrants find the safety of human touchpoints more comforting than digital.  ‍

3. Affluent High-touch Seekers‍

Individuals in this profile come from the same age bracket as the reserved digital immigrants, but unlike them, customers falling within this profile are high-income holders and are comfortable adapting to the digital touchpoints. Having said that, these individuals lay more emphasis on personal touch afforded by in-person interactions.  

4. Low Touch Digital Natives‍

This profile comprises of individuals under the age of 30 who give more value to digital channels over human touchpoints. For these individuals, it is important to keep experiences and interactions limited to one touchpoint. Customers within this category have low reliance on engagement with a business to arrive at a purchase decision. They are hands-on and quite aware of how to gather relevant information to aid their buying process.  

5. Omnishoppers‍

Omnishoppers comprise of working adults between the age of 29 to 49 years old who factor in both digital and human touchpoints equally. They seek omnichannel shopping experiences. But prefer online to offline, as they are comfortable with digital touchpoints. Omnishoppers are tech-savvy and are more demanding, social, connected and convenience-oriented than individuals from other categories.  

When businesses have clarity on which type of customer persona they are dealing with, their decisions and efforts become more impactful. For example, if a business is targeting affluent high-touch seekers, then it should ideally use human touchpoints where communication is targeted at the specific age demographic that falls under this persona. On the other hand, using the same strategy for low-touch digital natives may not work and a brand's efforts may go to waste if they use human touchpoints to appeal to this customer persona.

‍Importance of Building Customer Relationships

If you are seeking long-term business success, start building a working relationship with your customers. Customer loyalty, trust, and retention are the tenets of a successful business, and therefore it becomes important to foster deep relations with your customers. Developing effective communication with your customers allows them to feel more connected and secure with your business. It evokes brand advocacy, helps them recommend your products and services to their inner-circle, and pave the way for a harmonious business growth.

‍How To Win Over Your Customers

Customer loyalty is everything for a business. Based on the customer personas we defined above, let us look at 3 powerful and effective techniques that can help you win over your customers.

• ‍Round-the-clock Engagement‍

Brands that continuously engage with customers, win. Solving customer issues and providing round-the-clock support is extremely important - you never know which customer could end up bad-mouthing your brand on social media because of one small incident. Setting up a unified CX hub can help you nurture customer relationships, engage customers with rich multimedia content, and help in delivering first-time resolution to their issues.

• ‍Automate Lead Qualification

Wondering how your team can easily qualify leads and focus on tasks that add value and help in conversions? AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered chatbots can help you capture and qualify leads by providing a conversational interface for engaging with potential customers. By asking questions and providing relevant information, a chatbot can help to gather important customer data to help in determining whether a lead is qualified, leaving your team to focus on other critical aspects of business.

• ‍Pairing and Connection‍

Irrespective of which category the customers fall under, they do not like to repeat their pain points to multiple agents. It is important for a business to pair the customers with the right agent. This provides the customers a sense of familiarity and helps business in maintaining consistency. Routing customer enquiries to the right agents so that incoming traffic is handled easily and flexibly is a must for businesses of all sizes.

The digital landscape is highly customer-driven in the sense that today’s customers are aware of their needs and wants more than ever, and access to content and information makes it important for businesses to bring their A-game in terms of customer availability, engagement, and retention. It has become increasingly important to pay attention to each customer, go through their journey, understand their behaviour and preferences, and enable digital forms of engagement with them to foster deeper bonds. This allows businesses to grow exponentially in the long run, while maximising customer value.  

Reimagine how your business can build long-term strategies to improve the overall customer experience and improve ROI with CINNOX.