Customer stories are a great way to organize thinking for agile marketing. Customer stories force you to think from the customer’s perspective. Moreover, they automatically add a market and customer segmentation mentality to your thinking that aids in being agile.

It is impossible to think of customer stories without visualizing the customer. This forces you to consider what does this customer look like, what role do they play, what industry are they in, etc. The best way to capture this mental exercise is to keep a journal of the customer attributes that are associated with the story. Soon enough the customer will become flesh and blood and will bifurcate a number of times into different customers that are either individuals that play a different role in a buying decision or are uniquely different than others in the use of your product or service.

Having a set of customer descriptions, you can then use these to build customer panels and advisors for performing Continuous Market Monitoring. Recruiting customer prospects into panels, advisors or just spot interviews fleshes out the view of the customer. Natural segmentations start to occur. Homogeneities evolve and natural variables are revealed. These allow you to further refine your model and your stories creating more customer groupings, each with their own set of stories.

For example at Intermec we did an analysis of the retailer market segment for use of hand held computers on the store floor. We built a number of user stories through a series of customer interviews at different retail chains. Building up our set of stories we found large differences between store types. Large box discount stores used hand helds to do mobile checkout and process store returns. Grocery stores used them only to do inventory taking and receiving. Building up user stories allowed us to quickly segment the markets and prioritize design issues. We were able to decide what segments to retain and which to reject. On those we retained, we were able to identify the variables that drove alternative stories so that we could integrate stories into a larger whole.

Dynamic customer interaction brought down to earth with customer stories provide rich detail and transparency to the development of product and messaging.