Using Pandemic Personas as part of your Covid-19 CX response toolkit.

To help our clients understand and design for people with different needs and attitudes towards the Covid-19 climate, we’ve set out some thought-starters to articulate key Pandemic Personas which represent archetypes of how different people are reacting to the current situation.

We first issued our initial set of Pandemic Personas back in June and have since refreshed them to be more of the moment.

Tapping into our own online customer community, we researched the makers and breakers in relation to people dealing with the pandemic, now that we’re six months in, and new characteristics emerged.

Our Fast Adapter has become The Change Adopter and we’ve also introduced a new persona in The Life Evaluator.

The seven personas we have created are:

• The Hyper Health Aware
• The Conscientious Citizen
• The Remote Multi-Tasker
• The Shaken and Scared
• The Change Adopter
• The Determined Denier
• The Life Evaluator

While all of the personas listed are in the similar situation of having to cope with the disruption of a global pandemic, their individual needs can be very different.

For instance, we can imagine how stressful it could be for The Hyper Health Aware to come across The Determined Denier, especially if this interaction happens in a busy environment and he is ingnoring guidance to wear a mask or respect social distancing.

For The Remote Multi-Tasker speed and ease of service is a top priority. On the other hand, for The Conscientious Citizen the main concern is to know that the service providers they are engaging with are behaving ethically and responsibly.

By thinking through how the Pandemic Personas may behave in a diverse range of scenarios, we can begin to design a future that allows customers across this spectrum to fulfil their needs and thrive.

Our Pandemic Personas aim to provide a starting point for helping teams focus on customers’ new needs and attitudes.

Ideally one would enrich them further with brand and sector-specific research, which we can help with, but we hope they may be of immediate use when thinking about how to restart, reconfigure or reimagine your services and customer experiences.

If you’d like to discuss how best to use these and other assets in our CX Design toolkit, drop us a line at [email protected] to arrange a time to speak.