How to Create Meaningful Buyer Personas for the Buyer’s Journey: Support Stage

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the fifth blog within the series.

Your buyer made the purchase and the sale closed, so the journey’s over, right? Like all good (and ongoing) relationships, the journey’s never really over.

When someone purchases your solution, it’s not a guarantee they’ll be a customer forever if the experience isn’t right. While there may be a contract in place for a specific amount of time, what happens during that contract will largely determine whether the relationship continues beyond that. 

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.

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 as you have for the other stages. What you ask will depend on your products and services, but your goal should be to find out how supported your buyers felt post-purchase. 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 that 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? What types of results are you seeing?
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?
4. What do you like best about the benefits our products and/or services offer? Do they meet the expectations you had in mind when you partnered with us?
5. How would you describe your experience with us so far?

Type of Content at the Support Stage

• 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 your 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.
• Make updates, tweaks, and adjustments. Your strategy does not have to be set in stone. If something has changed since the beginning, help your customer determine a modified solution that will help them get the results they need.

Support Your Customers

Remember, providing support is an ongoing process as your customer navigates through using your products and services. You should remain active even after the sale transaction is complete because you want to create the best experience possible for your client’s satisfaction, future business, and future recommendations.

Do what you can to keep the conversation going with your customer as they make adjustments to fully implement your solution at their company. Be available to answer questions and provide resources to support their efforts. They will continue to need your help as they move into the final stage: retention. Positioning yourself as a source of assistance and support now is crucial to the relationship.

Read Part 1: Buyer Personas

Read Part 2: Awareness Stage

Read Part 3: Consideration Stage

Read Part 4: Decision Stage