- A kind but skeptical audience
After a long time putting together large amounts of research, mostly qualitative interviews with clients, employees, front-end personnel, benchmarking and stakeholder interviews, the team at RGP and Veracity finally had the service blueprints, personas, customer journey maps with pain points, key moments and metrics all mapped out. The meeting with the client execs was about to begin and they were a kind but doubtful audience.
- The doubts
Each team member presented the service blueprint, personas and customer journey for one product. I was the last one to present and the stakeholders were getting impatient. They could not understand why we had no statistics and percentages and why they should believe that the personas were representative for any of their clients.
- Failed attempts
It was my first meeting with the stakeholders and I could see my colleagues trying to explain that interviews are meant to convey emotions and make them feel what it’s like to be in the shoes of the clients. But the client’s execs were not buying any of it. They questioned why they should empathize with those particular clients and why they should change a good service because of a single persona (sic). My colleagues were stuck and unfortunately, the language barrier (the client was speaking Spanish and the team was led by English speakers) was making it difficult for our more senior colleagues to provide the relevant arguments.
- The arguments of an experienced researcher
I decided to step in since I understood the methodological questions the stakeholders would have liked to raise, but had no appropriate vocabulary to raise. I explained the process through which personas are created and that the methodology behind it makes one story be representative for many, in fact for all of our interviews. One thing which is done in fundamental research, but was not done in this research is to place in parentheses the codes corresponding to the interviewees who have provided information clustered into a persona. Had this practice been performed, 30 minutes of debate around the legitimacy of our approach would have not taken place. As an expert in the generalizability of qualitative research (a paper with more than 180 citations), I was at the right place at the right time. Saved the day.
