A personalized experience based on a customer profile: A music app that understands your listening habits and recommends similar artists or playlists you might like.

An exceptional personalized experience based on a customer profile: A music app that uses your data from the past year to create a (fictional) music festival lineup based on the artists you listen to the most, names the event after you, and sends you a shareable festival poster. Follow our guide on how to develop customer profiles so you can start providing hyper-personalized experiences for your customers and boost loyalty and retention.

What is a customer profile?

A customer profile is a document that contains key information about your ideal customer. You can use it as a strategy guide to creating personalized experiences.

Each profile should contain customer pain points, interests, buying patterns, demographic data, motivations, interaction history, and more. These details can help your business understand how consumers engage with your brand and products, so you can customize marketing campaigns, tailor messaging and conversations, and provide personalized support.

Remember to be transparent with customers about what data you gather and how you plan to use and store it. Always allow your customers to decide whether or not they want to share their information.

B2B vs. B2C customer profiles

There are two business types of customer profiles: Business-to-business (B2B) and Business-to-customer (B2C). The data you collect for client profiles will vary depending on whether you’re a B2B or B2C company.

• B2B customer profiles map the typical business that buys your goods or services, including the company’s size, industry, location, revenue, and target audience. The profile may also cover the decision-makers at the client company.
• B2C customer profiles focus on individual customers and feature demographic data like age, gender, and lifestyle preferences.

What is customer profiling?

Customer profiling is the process companies use to create customer profiles. The goal is to identify, describe, and segment customers based on numerous characteristics and variables, based on their personalities, buying habits, and behaviors. Customer profiling mainly focuses on your ideal customer’s pain points and brand interactions.

Benefits of customer profiling

With customer profiling, you’ll have the data you need to create the tailored experiences consumers want. The data allows you to see the customer’s motivations and deterrents behind their purchases and provides insights into what customers value most when interacting with brands. Here are some benefits your business can expect from customer profiling.

Improve efficiency by reducing silos

The road to accomplishing deeper personalization often gets blocked by siloed data. Having a system that unifies data from across departments allows teams to find the customer data they need quickly and efficiently. With a single customer view, agents can get the context required to create a personalized experience without switching between systems.

Drive loyalty through personalized and proactive experiences

Offering proactive and personalized experiences is essential to building trust and fostering customer loyalty. According to our CX Trends Report, 60 percent of customers say they can tell when they receive personalized recommendations from a brand, and they find them valuable. When customers feel like a brand understands them, they’re more likely to stick around. Leverage the data to engage with your customers and form a deeper connection with them.

Increase cross-team collaboration

Every team within your business has valuable insights that can enhance your customer profiles. Increasing cross-team collaboration enables you to create targeted marketing campaigns and deliver personalized support for great customer experiences. A system like the Zendesk Agent Workspace helps improve collaboration across teams by consolidating real-time information into a single view that each department can see.

Boost sales

Customer profiling shows you which groups to target. This helps your sales team identify high-quality leads and customize their approach. As a result, they may close more deals.

Say a customer profile reveals there’s interest in a product feature that your company now offers. You can customize your messaging when reaching out to the customer and start the process of closing a sale.

Gather insights to make data-informed decisions

Collecting relevant data that may be scattered across systems and consolidating it—with help from a customer data platform (CDP)—can provide valuable insights to help you make informed decisions. Marketing teams may have crucial information that could help close a sale, while customer support may have key data for a more personalized marketing campaign.

Types of customer profiling

The customer profile you want to create helps determine the types of data you need to collect. Here are common ways to segment your customers to create the best customer profile possible.

Demographic

Demographic profiling defines your customers by who they are. This type of segmentation groups customers by personal characteristics like:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Ethnicity
• Income
• Job title
• Education

Marketing and support teams often use this information to create personalized messaging and to identify communication channel preferences.

Psychographic

Psychographic profiling defines why customers buy your products or services. This type of customer profiling segments customers by:

• Personality traits
• Attitudes
• Opinions
• Values and beliefs
• Lifestyle
• Religions
• Political affiliation

Though this type of data is subjective and typically the most difficult to identify, it can be the most valuable information in the customer profile. It helps your business understand the thoughts and motivations behind purchases and how customers feel about your brand (also known as customer perception).

Behavioral

Behavioral profiling defines how your customers interact with your brand. This type of segmentation groups customers by behavioral tendencies like:

• Buying patterns
• Spending habits
• Brand interactions
• How they use your products or services
• Types of feedback

Businesses can use behavioral data to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, improve the overall customer experience, and make personalized recommendations.

Geographic

Geographic profiling defines your customers by their physical location and where they shop. This type of profiling separates customers by personal characteristics, such as:

• Physical location
• Language
• Culture
• Workplace

The factors of geographic data—like climate, cultural influences, delivery options, and rural vs. urban environmental needs and preferences—impact customer influences and shopping habits.

3 methods of customer profiling

Customer profiling will group customers with similar traits, characteristics, behaviors, motivations, or decision-making styles. You can approach customer profiling in three ways: psychographic, typology, and characteristic.

Psychographic method

The psychographic method uses the consumer’s qualities, traits, and lifestyles to define market segments. It covers:

• Demographics: age, location, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, internet access, job title, homeownership, and education level
• Lifestyle: hobbies, activities, interests, values, attitudes, opinions, and talking points (politics, religion, human rights, etc.)

Typology method

The typology method focuses on what drives the consumer to interact with you. It defines the customer by their motivation type:

• Need-based: customers who only buy what they need
• Deal-based: customers who look for discounts and care most about price points
• Impulse-based: emotionally driven customers who spend based on feelings and impulses
• Loyalty-based: customers who consistently buy from you and promote you to people in their network

Brand characteristics method

The characteristics method focuses on the traits that influence purchases. Some common traits for this approach consist of:

• Convenience: You make it fast and easy for buyers to do business with you.
• Personalization: You’re able to appeal to consumers on a personal level. They recognize that you tailor experiences to their specific wants and needs.
• Belonging: Customers feel like they’re part of a community. They connect with other customers, pay close attention to reviews, and regularly interact with you.

How to create a customer profile in 5 steps

The most successful profiles contain more than just basic details—they should include a wide range of data that showcases how your target audience interacts with your brand. To build a data-rich customer profile, you need customer database tools to track customer information. Here’s how to create a customer profile in five steps.

1. Use customer profile templates

Creating a customer profile on your own can be a time-consuming process. Rather than starting from scratch, use pre-built customer profile templates to plug in your customer data and build a profile quickly and easily.

2. Identify customer pain points and solutions

The next step is to identify the most common customer pain points and how your product or service solves them. Many customers may share similar pain points, and customer profiles can help you find the connective tissue.

3. Determine common demographics and behaviors

That leads to the third step: determining shared demographics and behaviors. Customer profiling data can help you find similarities between certain customer groups, like characteristics, locations, or motivations. This enables you to better target customers and personalize outreach, marketing, and customer service communications.

4. Gather and analyze customer feedback

Gathering and analyzing feedback can help you paint a picture of what your ideal customer looks like across different customer groups. You can collect feedback via:

• Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT, Net Promoter Score®, etc.)
• Customer interactions and interviews
• Focus groups
• Social listening
• Online reviews
• Community forums

Once you capture this quantitative and qualitative customer profile data, you can track and analyze it with a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

5. Find the right software to integrate data across tools and systems

Use your CRM to continuously refine your customer groups and integrate the data across tools and systems. The right CRM software will help you collect data from your current customers—like name, location, history, and information from the entire customer journey—to create the most accurate profiles.