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What are Personas and how are they used in Experience Management?

Posted: Mar 25, 2025

Read time: 5 minutes

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#Customer Journey Mapping #Personas

Personas form a pivotal part of the journey mapping process, in this blog we explain what a Persona is, why they are essential in defining and understanding customer segments, how to use Personas and what you need to consider when creating them.

What does Persona mean in Customer Experience?

In Customer Experience, Persona meaning refers to the detailed representation of a customer based on research and data, it’s about creating fictional yet realistic profiles that reflect customer behaviors, needs and preferences.

Personas help businesses tailor their interactions, marketing strategies and product offerings to enhance engagement and satisfaction.

To have the definition of Persona explained simply, it acts as a guide for companies to help understand and define target audience better, leading to more personalized and meaningful customer experiences.

How to make a Persona and use in journey mapping

Creating a customer Persona starts with research and data analysis to develop a realistic Persona profile that represents key audience segments. Start your Persona research by gathering demographic information, behaviors, pain points and goals.
Many companies will have transactional, sentiment and demographic data held in their CRM and customer feedback surveys that will support this exercise, but because Personas are a visual and more empathetic representation of your customers, this will require input from cross-functional teams such as service, sales and marketing.

Visit our Persona creation section for best practice on which elements you need to add into your Persona template, helping to structure insights effectively as a Persona creator. Building Personas in Journey Management software such as Cemantica, helps you create, enrich and use in targeted customer journey maps.

In Cemantica, you can start from scratch when building Personas with sections blocks you can add (for example demographics, challenges, lifestyle, goals etc.), configure and easily drag & drop to structure how you work. To work faster you can start with a pre-built Persona profile template of Persona examples that again can be edited and refined for Persona development.

Advanced tools like an AI Persona generator can further refine Persona creation by analyzing large data sets and predicting customer preferences. Cemantica´s AI assistant, Alex helps to either build or enrich Personas based on your data, it can create additional text in existing sections or create new sections to better structure your user / customer / employee profile and saves a lot of time spent researching. Read the "How to Create a Persona with AI" blog for more detail too.

You can attach one or more Personas in customer journeys to illustrate dedicated experiences of each customer segment, and compare your fictional Personas against real customers using sentiment analysis at each interaction touchpoint and journey stage. This helps to refine your Personas so that they reflect your target audience, for example adding pain points or preferences. This allows you to move from assumptive Personas to data-driven Personas.

Defining your customer Persona types

Different customer Personas help you better understand your customer segments and enable you to target them more effectively.

There are many Persona types, depending on the objectives of your experience program, your industry and company type. For example, are you mapping and optimizing the experience of your customers, users or employees? Are you operating in a B2B or B2C model? What level journey are you mapping (macro or micro) to determine how much detail you need to zoom in on?

Here are just some Persona examples:

Buyer Personas

What is a buyer Persona? Buyer Personas represent the various types of real customers who decide to purchase your products or services. These decision-makers may have different motivations, purchasing power, knowledge and buying histories. Additionally, a buyer profile is not always the end user of the product, so their journey stages, needs and pain points will look different from user Personas for example.

User Personas

What is a user Persona? A user Persona represents an actual end-user of your product. The individual using the product is not always the same person who makes the purchase. For example, in a business setting, a company may purchase software, but the employees using it would be the user Personas that Product Managers and Developers consider when improving functionality and usability.

Employee Personas

Each employee Persona represents the different types of employees within an organization, created when optimizing the Employee Experience , to better tailor workplace policies, training programs, communication strategies and technology solutions. Similar to customer Personas, workplace Personas are based on research, data and employee feedback, capturing key characteristics such as job roles, motivations, pain points, work preferences and career goals.

As you develop the Personas you need, it will help to connect and prioritize them (with Persona Hierarchies) so they are useful to the journeys you create and match your goals.

What are the benefits of customer Personas?

We have seen how journey mapping and Personas go hand in hand to better visualize and improve specific experiences of customers.

Internally too, using Personas to represent current or proposed customer segments can help align stakeholders with a more human representation that inspires empathy and reaches a common understanding. For example, customer service agents can print out a Persona template PowerPoint slide to use in playbooks to prompt them when communicating.

Personas and customer journey mapping with Cemantica

Cemantica is an end-to-end Journey Management platform, from strategy to execution, using Personas throughout your CX Program to help bring your customers to life. Our software allows you to create, Personalize and develop Personas with easy-to-use templates and even AI in the journey mapping process and share with multiple teams by exporting to images or slides.

For more information, visit our Personas page and request a demo to see how easy it is use Personas in our platform.