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A Guide to Creating Personas Part I: Are Personas Really That Important?

Quippy

• 5 min read
A Guide to Creating Personas Part I: Are Personas Really That Important?

Good UX design is one of the most important factors in determining a product’s success when it gets into the hands of your customers. To that end, AI assistant persona creation has increasingly become a focal point in Conversation Design. But when it comes to customer engagement strategies, building AI personalities is still a new practice for most teams–and one that people either nail on the head, or get really (really) wrong. So how do you know if creating a persona for your businesses’ AI Assistant is worth it? While we’re at it, how should you go about creating a persona if you’ve already decided that customer satisfaction AI methodologies are important to the user experiences you’re creating? 

In this initial installment of our five part series AI Assistant development guide–specific to persona strategy for AI Assistants–we illustrate what personas actually are, whether you need one, and lay out the building blocks for building a solid persona to augment the Conversational AI experiences (CAI) you’re creating. Let’s get started!

What is a Persona

As most marketers are keenly aware, customer personas–also called buyer personas–exist as a way of helping brands hone in on how to message and interact with different segments of their target audience. A buyer persona is essentially a portrayal of a fictional customer crafted around research, actionable data, and analysis. Through building buyer personas, brands can be more strategic in determining what branding and AI strategies are right for them, can more easily select the right channels to speak with their audience members, sharpen their brand identity, and become more effective in creating experiences–from voice user interface design, to crafting CAI voice and tone, to user experience personalization–that gets people to engage with them. 

But AI Assistant personas are a bit different from buyer personas in that the objective is to build brand identity behind personalized AI interactionsI, as opposed to creating the personality of a fictional audience member or customer. While you should be using the buyer personas your brand has already created to help inform how you design your AI Assistant's conversational style, keep in mind there won’t be much actionable data to suggest how positively or negatively customers view aspects of your AI Assistant’s personality until it's been in use for a little while. At that point you can go back to the persona strategy for your AI Assistant to make tweaks as needed.    

Why Build a Persona–or Should You?

It’s no secret that AI assistants (and the users that interact with them) have propagated throughout the enterprise, small business, and consumer landscape, if nothing else than for the fact that, when designed correctly, the technology can dramatically help increase your customer satisfaction AI strategy, reduce the burden on service representatives, and free up more of your time to focus on more important things. For these reasons, having a well crafted Persona strategy for AI Assistants within your digital ecosystem will play an increasingly big part in any modern team or organization’s quest for digital transformation and customer engagement. But how much time and effort do you actually need to put into building your AI Assistant’s persona?

To formulate an answer, first think about the context behind  the customer experiences you already have in place. How do you expect your  employees to interact with the customers who come through your door or call into your call centers? What are the branding and AI techniques your business uses for other online experiences you use? Are your copywriters encouraged to be warm, friendly, and playful–or is your brand identity and messaging approach to be more reserved, professional, and purely transactional? 

Also, think about how you’d like your employees to interact with your customers, and take that into account when it comes to building a persona for your AI Assistant. 

For example, the types of personalities a hiring manager might see as a good fit for a movie theater are going to be different than the types of personalities a hiring manager would be looking for to fill a bank telling role. The types of questions too–as well as the way customers may deviate from one path of conversation to the next–are different as well. This is because the movie theater industry and the banking industry are vastly different, and the needs and expectations of those customers are also vastly different. 

In a banking scenario, consider the fact that your customers are going to be mostly adults, and all of them are going to be dealing with a topic that’s sensitive to many: their money. When a banking customer interacts with a bank teller, the conversation should be efficient and transactional–so speed is key, meaning you may want to put slightly less time into building out a detailed persona and CAI voice and tone for your AI Assistant, as too much flowery personality can potentially lead to friction in the experience if not crafted in an ongoing and diligent manner. 

This doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t want your bank tellers to be warm and personable, but the buttoned-up style of conversation that happens between a bank teller and a banking customer needs to be taken into account when building the AI Assistant’s functionality. 

Likewise, if you’re building a conversational experience so that people can book movie tickets online, you’d expect a more buttoned-down conversational style to take place between your employees and your customers. For example, the conversation may deviate from the transactional goal of purchasing a ticket for a specific movie, to questions about recommendations based on interests, age groups, and user experience personalization via other segments. 

In general we suggest creating a persona for your AI Assistant no matter what role that AI Assistant is going to play, and no matter what industry you’re in. 

If you want your AI Assistant to answer non-transactional questions about the weather, or their favorite color, creating a persona is almost certainly a must. That said, a persona is something you can build towards over the long haul–it’s not necessarily something you need to have built right away, as AI Assistants (like humans) are capable of growing their abilities, and functional uses over time. 

For instance, if you’ve built a healthcare AI Assistant to help people find a doctor near them, a persona may be something you craft over time as you garner more actionable data from your users. You probably wouldn’t want to build in a lot of non-transactional interactions until the data starts to suggest a function like this could improve the customer experience.  

In any case, whether you decide to build a persona or not, the conversational experiences should be backed by a style guide so your Conversation Designers can reference what is–and isn’t–allowed in terms of the content they’re creating.

The Building Blocks of a Great Persona

Let’s now quickly go through step by step to call out the different areas you should be considering when building your AI Assistant’s persona. There are four specific areas to focus on with a number of sub categories for each. Don’t worry, we’ll go into further details about each section in separate posts: 

  1. The CAI’s Organization
    1. The organization the CAI was built for
    2. The Organization’s Brand Identity
    3. The CAI’s relationship to the organization’s brand
    4. The Organization’s audience
    5. The CAI’s standard goals
    6. The CAI’s persuasive goals
    7. The CAI’s channels

  1. The CAI’s identity
    1. The CAI’s character traits
    2. The CAI’s interaction intentions
    3. The CAI’s gender
    4. The CAI’s age
    5. The CAI’s avatar
    6. The CAi’s geographics
    7. The CAI’s personification
    8. The CAI’s backstory
    9. The CAI’s name

  1. The  CAI’s tone and voice
    1. Voice type
    2. Vocal pitch
    3. Speed of talking
    4. Energy
    5. Accent
  2. The AI Persona’s lexicon
    1. Greetings
    2. Implicit confirmations
    3. Explicit Confirmations
    4. Confirming the user wants to move forward
    5. Confirmation of a preference
    6. Confirmation of comprehension
    7. Confirmation that clarifies when the CAI is mid-confident about a user’s intent

Hopefully this information helps you get started on the journey toward creating the perfect persona for your brand’s CAI. In our next post, we dissect the things you should consider when building a CAI persona around your organization.  

Happy creating!  

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