Meaningful Buyer Personas for the Buyer Journey: Support Stage

Your buyer made the purchase, so why are we still writing blog posts about the buyer’s journey? The sale closed, so the journey’s over, right? Well, not exactly.

Just because someone purchases your solution doesn’t mean he’ll stick around. If it’s a high ticket item, he might not be able to get out of it so easily, but he’ll definitely be vocal in his network if he’s unhappy with his initial experience. Your new buyers have networks full of peers who are potential SQLs, which means you should consider this stage of the buying cycle to be another sort of entry point for new customers. When delivering support content to new buyers, you’re both working to retain them and market to their networks.

After decision comes support. You might consider support to be in the realm of customer service, but customer service isn’t skilled in the art of creating an experience. If your company’s support experience underwhelms, your buyers will tell their peers, and your sales pipeline will suffer.

Buyer Persona Development for the Support Stage

You can use the same buyer persona interviewing process to gather information about your support experience. What you ask will depend on what you sell, but your goal should be to find out how supported your buyers felt post-purchase. So, for example, you might ask questions like:

1. Once you bought our product, what were your next steps? How did you get the product implemented?
2. Now you’ve used our product for a while, what’s your opinion of it? How did things go when you first started using it? Were there any problems? If so, how did you get them resolved?
3. How often do you communicate with someone from our company? Do you contact customer service? Get marketing emails? How do you feel about those communications?

What should you do with this information?

• Fix what’s broken. If the implementation process was rocky, find out what went wrong and get it fixed. If content can help, make that happen.
• Do more of what’s working (and less of what’s not.) If you’re customer service team is excelling, find a way to play that up and create more content around it. Have your best customer service people blog about frequently asked questions or talk about them via Google Hangout.

You’ve almost made it! There’s just one more stage to go. It’s retention, and we’ll talk about it next.

Stephanie Kapera is a special projects coordinator for Kuno Creative and the co-founder of Up All Night Creative, a Raleigh-based content marketing agency that helps B2B and B2C companies develop magazine-quality web content. Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Photo credit: Clearly Ambiguous