Equifax: Buyer & User Personas

When I arrived at Equifax Workforce Solutions, one of the first questions I asked was, “Who are we helping?” I wanted to review any personas we had so I could understand our customers and hit the ground running learning how I could help build experiences that worked for those customers. Unfortunately, there were no personas available. I spent the next year or so socializing the need to understand our customers, and getting buy-in for workshops across all of our vertical marketing channels to build some prototypical personas.

At that time, the idea of outside research was not possible, with customer lists owned by the sales team, and I being organized under IT. Over the course of that year, I worked with the vertical marketing leaders and the sales team to develop trust, so that we could build a good picture of our customers.

The personas below represent a significant portion of that work, which included gathering as many stakeholders from the vertical marketing teams as possible, to include product managers, direct support agents, and marketing technologists. All of these individuals had various levels of understanding of our customers, and we synthesized their knowledge into the best picture we could, so that we could get buy-in for real-world research activities.