CX Game · Personas

Persona Development Challenge

Participants work to create detailed customer personas using data from various sources, emphasizing empathy and understanding.

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Participants

2-8

Facilitators

Seniority

Any

Level

Easy

Learning Objective

Teams can build a rigorous, evidence-based customer persona from mixed data sources — balancing demographics, goals, pains, and behaviours — and defend it against the easy slide into assumption.

How to Play

Setup

Provide each team a data pack for one segment: survey snippets, support transcripts, analytics summaries, and quotes. Give a persona canvas (goals, frustrations, context, behaviours, quote). Form teams of three to five, one segment each.

Rules

Teams mine their data pack and populate the persona canvas in 20 minutes.
Every canvas entry must be traceable to a piece of evidence in the pack.
Teams then present their persona for three minutes as if introducing a real person.
Other teams play "evidence auditor", challenging any claim that isn't supported.
Strongest evidence-backed persona — not the most colourful — wins.

Debrief

Spend ten minutes converting the canvas into commitment. Ask three questions in order:

Which persona detail felt true but had no evidence behind it?
Where do your current personas rely on the team's assumptions rather than customer data?
What is one decision this persona should change — and who needs to see it?

CX Principle Reinforced

Empathy at scale requires evidence, not invention. Personas are how organisations hold the customer in mind during decisions, but invented personas embed the team's biases and confirm what they already believe. Anchoring every attribute to data counters confirmation bias and keeps the persona honest. The challenge teaches teams to treat persona-building as research synthesis, producing tools that genuinely sharpen customer-centred decisions.

Format

Format: In-person or virtual (data packs + canvas)
Players: 2-8
Duration: 45–60 minutes
Level: Easy

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