A Wren Says

Yesterday, I posted a quick overview about the payer roles. Now, let’s spend some time thinking about what that would mean for your approach to customers. A quick note: As you go through this remember that these roles could be held by completely different people in the decision process, but it might be helpful for you to consider them like phases. Essentially, think about how this knowledge might help you walk your customers through their journey with you. Now, let’s dive in.

The first role is the seeker. Your focus for those in seeker role/phase is building awareness. This person is focused on gaining new information. That could be passive means, and they just happen upon the information when it comes, or actively, where they are researching with an intent to act on that information. Knowing this, you can approach this with the use of inspiration and education.

This inspiration is the easy stuff. Your first option for communicating with customers is probably advertisements. You pull together a slick commercial or print or media campaign just to get them to be aware of your product. But of course you can’t stop there. Once their inspired and want to learn more, you need to move in to provide the education they’re seeking.

To be clear, I don’t mean you need to provide a formal course, but you could. Your goal here is to make it easy for your customers to learn more about your product. This could be intentionally designing your website with answers to key questions. Or maybe you create product demo videos. There is a multitude of materials and trainings you can develop to give customers the tools they need to learn more. Whatever you do, make sure you equip your people to be one of those tools.

Invariably people will come in store or interact with customer service. When you think critically about this seeker role being an important first step, you see the importance of properly preparing your people to answer questions, provide examples, and give alternatives if need be. The better you educate and support your customer-facing team, the better you satisfy your customers’ need for information.

As you think about your strategy, what are some ways you could better address the needs of those in the seeker role?