Enterprise Personas

M&T Bank began to reinvent the way it understood customer needs, behaviors, and attitudes towards their products and services. A group of Segmentation Leads and our User Experience Research team set off to better understand not only our current customer base, but potential customers as well.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Hypothesis Prioritization

Stakeholder interviews

Facilitation

Screeners

Interview guides

Contextual interviews

Analysis

Affinity diagram

Synthesis

 

Our research roadmap began in-house. We conducted stakeholder interviews around the bank to better understand risks, constraints, and business goals. This allowed our team to understand how to frame the research, what goals our internal customers want from the enterprise personas, and methodology and field logistics. Simultaneously, we held sessions to prioritize hypothesis from our Segmentation Lead partners. We were interested in what data they currently had, what assumptions they had high confidence in, and what assumptions they had low confidence in so we could focus our research in those areas.

After conducting these sessions and interviews our next objective was to focus on the customer journeys we believed mattered most. Our goal was to understand if these journeys were important to customers and prospects. We then used the prioritized journeys to inform our objectives, which drove the creation of our research artifacts (field guides, interview guides, participants activities, technology).

Over the course of 2 weeks our team traveled throughout our footprint to peoples homes and businesses to conduct 2 hour conversations. We used this time to better understand peoples goals, aspirations, daily lives, motivations, and obstacles.

After each interview we debriefed and reflected on what we had heard and saw, and created a quick recap of the interview with the participant.

Once our in-field research was complete, we brought the team back together to share findings from their experiences and begin synthesizing the data. Throughout the course of two days and quite a bit of affinity mapping we were able to identify themes and insights that would help inform the personas and bring them to life. We then held our final sessions where we finalized the insights, themes, and the information to include in each persona.