New customer insights do not help your digital ministries unless you do something. Your church staff gave up valuable time to make these interviews a success. They will want to see the results. Explore how to apply customer interview results and help your church communications.
This is a continuation in a series around internal customer interviews. I would first read my article on creating an interview. Next see how I analyzed the results. Finally, continue reading below to see how to apply your insights to new projects.
Presenting Results
One of the first things you should do is let your internal staff know what you discovered. Reassure them their time was well spent, and how it will benefit the ministries they care about. Host a meeting and give a presentation of your findings. Focus on what actions will occur, and how it will impact them. Some examples are:
- What parts of the website do you hope to update?
- How will new features integrate with ministries?
- Do you have new social media campaigns?
- Are there new engagement goals for emails?
Rank Projects
I want to stress you do not want to bias your experiments. Let the evidence speak, not your own feelings about things. But you know of lagging projects that could use help. Your requests probably carry weight on how your church prioritizes projects. Yet extra voices make the message louder and clearer. Use the results to get those projects the attention they deserve. More importantly, your data may tell you that a project may not be important after all. Remember you need to represent the voice of the customer.
Update Personas
If you do not have personas for your church, go make them. Do not worry, you can create them quickly. Then come back and get ready to enhance them. A key factor in having great personas is they are regularly updated. These internal customer interviews give you plenty of data for accomplishing this. You should better understand who your regular customers are. It tells you their biggest pain points. You learn why they seek out certain ministries.
Recharge Your Empathy
Take time to read these first-hand accounts of how prospective and existing members of your church feel. This should be part of presenting your results. Emphasize these points with your web team. Make a small poster of quotes to encourage and inspire everyone throughout the next year. Which brings me to my another topic, next time.
Plan for Next Time
The good thing about this undertaking is you do not need to perform it often. Conducting interviews once a year is a good schedule to keep. Remember that new ministries or staff changes affect how long your interviews take. If you perform more interviews, it will take more time to analyze the data. Plan for more time if you felt rushed.
Action Item
As you can see, there is a lot you can do with these findings. If you did not start your interviews yet, hopefully this will inspire you. Then begin the arduous task of analyzing those results. Finally, use those results for great things in your digital ministries.
Photo courtesy of Carl Dwyer
