Overview
Heard provides financial back office services for therapists, managing their bookkeeping, taxes, and offering financial insights. As our customer base expanded, we faced challenges in identifying our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) versus our current clientele. Previously, we had outdated personas based on job functions. The marketing team developed personas for targeting and selling to prospects, while the Product and Design teams created personas centered on desired workflows. Recognizing the fragmented customer journey, I took the initiative to create a cohesive set of personas to be used across the entire customer journey.
Here are the deliverables I focused on:
Customer Journey Map
Service Blueprint
Personas
My contribution
Discovery User Research
Stakeholder Alignment
User Journey Mapping
Service Blueprint
Personas
The team
1 × co-founder, CPO
1 x Product Manager
1 x Director of Marketing
Year
2024
Process
Audit the current customer experience
I conducted a comprehensive audit of all customer touchpoints, starting from their initial engagement with Heard, through signing up for a consultation call, registering for Heard, and using the product. After completing the audit, I met with stakeholders across the organization to understand each step of the customer journey and capture all the actions involved in assisting customers.
Customer Journey Map
After meeting with stakeholders, I began creating a customer journey map that encapsulated customer sentiment. Below is a small snippet of the customer journey map, focusing on the sign-up and onboarding steps.
Service Blueprint
Using insights from the customer journey map, I identified all front-of-stage and back-of-stage actions taken by the Heard team at every customer touchpoint. This exercise revealed customer experience gaps that the team could address. These gaps were shared with the relevant stakeholders, and experience improvements were added to project backlogs.
*Unfortunately, Heard has requested that the Service Blueprint not be accessible to individuals outside the company. Therefore, I cannot share the Service Blueprint artifact.*
Personas
The design team began crafting personas that incorporated all the learnings up to this point.
Service Blueprint
125 hour Grain User Research Repository
User Research Studies
ZenDesk tickets
Internal stakeholder interviews
Outcome
Working cross-functionally led to a unified focus on creating experiences for three distinct personas across the entire customer journey. These personas enabled all teams—Marketing, Sales, and EPD—to tailor future projects to our three ideal customer profiles. Identifying gaps in the experience prompted cross-functional projects that further improved the customer experience. For example, the Marketing team adopted language more aligned with product copy, and the Sales team began identifying prospect behaviors that informed the redesign of the onboarding experience.