What is a customer profile? Guide, examples, and templates

The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2025 shows that 61 percent of consumers want businesses to use the data they collect about them to personalize their experience with AI.

This data is key to building brand loyalty. How can you use data to give your customers that extra push of customization that takes their experience from good to great? By creating a data-rich customer profile of your target audience.

Follow our guide on how to create a data-rich customer profile of your target audience so you can start providing hyper-personalized experiences for your customers and boost loyalty and retention.

More in this guide:

• What is a customer profile?
• Benefits of customer profiling
• Types of customer profiling
• How to create a customer profile in 5 steps
• Customer profile templates + examples
• 9 tools you can use to collect customer profile data
• How often should I update customer profiles?
• Frequently asked questions
• Use your customer profile data to create people-centric experiences

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 details like:

• Pain points

• Interests

• Buying patterns

• Demographic data

• Motivations

• Interaction history

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 types of business customer profiles: Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (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.

Regardless of the difference in their data collection goals, both B2B and B2C companies need to prioritize updated customer profiles for the highest quality customer service.

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 

Siloed data often blocks progress toward deeper personalization. A system that unifies data from across departments allows teams to quickly and efficiently find the customer data they need. 

With a single customer view, agents can access all necessary context at once. This eliminates the need to switch between systems while creating personalized experiences.

Drive loyalty through personalized and proactive experiences

Offering proactive and personalized experiences is essential to building trust and fostering customer loyalty. One way to do that is with AI—whether over text or voice, AI can deliver human-centric experiences in natural language.

Our CX Trends Report 2025 reveals that 74 percent of consumers said this hyper-personalization improves their experience when they work with tools like AI agents. These intelligent bots can analyze customer intent, sentiment, and language to provide targeted support. 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

Relevant data is often scattered across systems. Consolidating this information with a customer data platform (CDP) provides valuable insights for more informed decision-making. 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 methods of customer segmentation to create the best customer profile possible.

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.

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

• 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.

• Determine common demographics and behaviors: Customer profiling data can help you find similarities between certain customer groups, like characteristics, locations, or motivations. This enables you to target customers better and personalize outreach, marketing, and customer service communications.

• Gather and analyze customer feedback: Gathering and analyzing feedback can help you visualize your ideal customer across different customer groups. Collect feedback from customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT, Net Promoter Score®, etc.), social listening, community forums, and more.

• Find the right software to integrate data across tools and systems: Once you capture this quantitative and qualitative customer profile data, you can track and analyze it with a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

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.

Customer profile templates + examples

Our customer profile templates make it easy to get started. With your free download, you’ll get five fill-in-the-blank PDFs:

• Basic customer profile template
• Comprehensive customer profile template
• B2B customer profile template
• B2C customer profile template
• Ideal customer profile (ICP) scorecard template
• Zendesk Agent Workspace customer profile example

Basic customer profile template

This easily scannable template provides—you guessed it—the basic information you need at a glance. The basic customer profile includes demographics, the products or services used, pain points, and solutions.

Comprehensive customer profile template

This template allows you to dive deep into the customer details, with plenty of blank space to add relevant customer data.

B2B customer profile template

This customer profile template gives you space to add the important details for your ideal B2B customers, including business size, revenue, structure, strengths, weaknesses, location, budget, pain points, and solutions.

B2C customer profile template

This template has everything you need to create a profile for B2C customers, including their professional overview, the products they use, the benefits and challenges of product use, pain points, and a customer summary.

Ideal customer profile (ICP) scorecard template

The ICP scorecard template allows you to use a scoring system to assess the potential fit of a customer. It includes categories for need, timeline, budget, and decision-making power.

Scores range from zero to two based on how well they fit the assigned criteria. If a customer’s score exceeds your threshold, odds are they’re an ideal customer.

Zendesk Agent Workspace customer profile example

The Zendesk Agent Workspace customer profile shows you how a customer profile looks when pulling customer data into a single unified view. This marketing profile example lets you see contact information, activity history, ticket information, additional customer details, and a full conversation history.

9 tools you can use to collect customer profile data

Consumers give companies their data in dozens of ways every day. Every interaction on your website, social media, and other customer touchpointsallows you to capture customer details, but that information is only useful if you have access to it, and you will ideally have access to all of it in one place.

Here are a few tools to help you collect customer data to help you understand buyers better and build long-term customer loyalty.

• Lead capture forms: Embed a sign-up form into your website and ask site visitors to fill it out with their contact information. In exchange, they’ll get access to something, like a special discount code or a white paper. You’ll learn which products or subjects each visitor is interested in while gathering basic information about them.

• Surveys: Send surveys to customers who used your product or service (and/or interacted with your support team) to understand what they like and dislike about your offerings. You can use that valuable customer feedback to make improvements and build stronger customer relationships.

• Email marketing: Capture data from your customer email interactions to inform your targeted marketing profiling. For example, if a client clicks on an email about a specific product they haven’t purchased yet, it might be a sign that it’s time for an upsell. Email marketing platforms can also integrate with your CRM software to give you an overall picture of a customer’s engagement level with your brand.

• Social media: Are your customers following your social media channels? If not, think about how to attract their attention. Have they liked a lot of your Facebook posts or shared them with their friends? Do they regularly respond to your business’s tweets? If so, you know they’re loyal customers. All this information can be merged into a CRM for your marketing team to use.

• Customer support channels: An omnichannel experience allows you to deliver streamlined support and meet customers where they are. You can start a conversation on one channel and resume it at a later time—on a different channel—without losing context. This provides a flexible, customer-centric communication method that records data and conversation history.

• Google Analytics: This tool provides deep insights into customer interactions on your website, so you can identify what’s working and what’s not. You can see the most popular pages, learn about your audience’s interests, and sense how visitors engage with your site.

• Customer accounts: A customer’s registered account on your website or company platform offers basic information (such as name, email, or preferred method of communication). If a customer logs in to their account while browsing your website, you’ll see how they interact with each of your products.

• E-commerce and billing platforms: Tools like Shopify collect information about how a customer makes purchase decisions. They also obtain key data like what your customer purchased, how much money they spent, and how frequently they place orders.

• Customer service software: Open, flexible customer service software allows you to integrate all your data from different sources into your CRM, giving you a complete picture of the customer. When you have the information you need in one place, you’ll better understand how to build great customer experiences.

Even if you use these types of tools, you don’t necessarily need to integrate every data point into a CRM at once. You can choose what to include based on your company’s objectives. Regardless of what information you obtain, the centralization of data will help your team provide a consistent customer experience.

How often should I update customer profiles?

At a minimum, customer service companies should conduct quarterly reviews of their customer profiles to ensure the information remains accurate and relevant.

Customer profiles should be treated as living documents that evolve alongside your customers’ changing needs and behaviors. Scheduling maintenance helps prevent decision-making based on outdated information and helps you to capture emerging trends in customer preferences and pain points.

Frequently asked questions

Use your customer profile data to create people-centric experiences

Building data-rich profiles will help you improve your marketing, sales, and support by anticipating what customers need. When you have all that data, you can start strategizing how to approach things next.

A comprehensive profile helps you know who your customers are and what they want before they’ve even asked a question. Your customers will likely be more loyal to your brand because they know you can solve their problems. These positive experiences should lead to reduced customer churn.