Paper

Innovation through AI dialogue

Living Personas & Digital Customer Twins

Reading time: approx. 3′ 28″

Digital customer twins and highly personalised ‘living personas’ are modern technologies that enable companies to gain deeper insights into customer needs and behaviour. These innovative tools support the creation of realistic user profiles that can be continuously updated and are particularly useful when making complex marketing decisions.

Concepts and advantages

Digital customer twins and living personas are based on the use of AI and make it possible to create dynamic and contextualised user profiles. These technologies support planners, designers, innovation, product and marketing managers by providing better foresight, idea and knowledge productivity as well as more objective targeting of new developments and market addresses.

Challenges and solutions

Creating and maintaining traditional personas often requires extensive surveys and manual data collection, which is both time-consuming and expensive. AI-based approaches offer a more efficient and accurate way to create and update personas by integrating and analysing different data sources. The challenges lie in generating planning-relevant and dynamic customer data and providing efficient and user-friendly access to this data.

Personalisation and contextualisation

By utilising digital customer twins and living personas, companies can tailor their products and services more specifically to the needs of their customers. The continuous updating of these profiles ensures that they are always up to date and reflect current customer preferences. This high level of personalisation and contextualisation improves stakeholder immersion and facilitates decision-making.

Technical innovations

Various approaches such as Bulk Training, Fine Tuning, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Continuous Online Learning and In-Context Learning are used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of LLMs (Large Language Models). A novel model, Latent Insight Amplifiers (LIAs), optimises in-context learning and enables efficient and effective knowledge injection. LIAs offer significant improvements in the areas of understanding, information processing, efficiency, costs and individualisation.

Areas of application

Digital customer twins and living personas have a wide range of applications in various industries and business areas:

Product development and design:

They can simulate the behaviour of customers and better understand their preferences and requirements, which leads to products that are better suited to their needs.

Personalised marketing and sales enablement:

By analysing data from digital customer twins, companies can implement highly personalised marketing measures and improved acceptance management, which leads to improved customer loyalty and higher sales.

Customer service and support:

Digital customer twins can be used to predict and identify customer queries and issues before they occur, allowing organisations to respond more proactively.

Training and knowledge management:

Digital twins can simulate the use of a product or service and create interactive tutorials or troubleshooting guides, improving training and support for customers and employees.

Future perspectives

The integration of AI into the persona development process offers significant advantages in terms of efficiency, quality, costs and relevance. Companies can create precise, up-to-date and comprehensive personas and better customise their products and services to the needs of their customers. The ongoing development and improvement of these technologies will lead to greater immersion and objectification in decision-making processes.

Conclusions

Digital customer twins and living personas represent a significant progression in the area of customer-centred planning and decision-making. They enable continuous and replicable collection of customer insights and immersive interaction with this data. These technologies promote efficiency and accuracy in product and service development and offer new opportunities for interaction and decision-making in companies.

To summarise, digital customer twins and living personas offer significant benefits for companies through the use of advanced AI technologies and data-driven approaches. They not only support the creation and maintenance of user profiles, but also enable a deeper and continuous insight into the needs and behaviours of customers. This leads to improved customer loyalty, higher productivity and increased efficiency in various business areas. The continuous development and optimisation of these technologies will further increase their importance and application in practice.

Download PDF

https://doi.org/10.25368/2024.EEE

Published in

ENTWERFEN ENTWICKELN ERLEBEN

Year

2024

Authors

Oliver Gerstheimer; Phillipp Schütz, Stefan Trebbin, Frank Rauchfuß & Stefan Holtel