10 Reasons for Customer Segmentation in Customer Service

Wed, 13 Feb 2019, in Customer Service

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There is a certain art to getting your message or solution across to someone who needs it. As an art of efficiency, it makes every action count, having your marketing dollar go as far as possible.

We always see businesses say “our product is truly remarkable, it appeals to everyone!” without so much a second thought. Yet, even multinational corporations tailor their products and services to audiences in particular locations, of a particular demographic or personality trait.

But we already segment a lot. We segment our sales and lead generation for the right audience because personalization matters. So why not personalize for customer support, too?

Optimizing to better understand your audience has a number of benefits. Not least of all getting the right people to buy your product or service. Yet, it’s a closely guarded secret that tailoring your communication to specific customer segments can make for an excellent support strategy.

Read More: The 4 Customer Types You Meet In Support

By segmenting, you do a lot more than just get closer to your customers. You make them feel at home, too. When customers feel comfortable in interacting with your brand, it does wonders in increasing sales, loyalty and long-term engagement. This markedly increases the value you can now extract from each customer.

The worst thing you can do is talk to your potential (and actual) customers as though they are all the same. Which customers do you spend time on? Which ones should you re-engage with? Which customers do you delight and exceed their expectations? Which ones do you ignore and stay away from?

Targeted advertising and marketing is one thing, but adjusting your product strategy and company philosophy according to specific customer segments is something else. In both cases, you increase the odds of selling and converting your prospects – without “throwing spaghetti onto the ceiling and seeing what sticks”.

When it comes time to expand, you can’t take any chances. Knowing where your customers are (geographically, demographically, financially speaking) allows you to cater to their every need. Every successful company (from Facebook to Uber to Apple), aside from knowing their customers like the back of their hand, knew what they wanted “before” they actually did.

Once you’ve established your customer segments, you can engage with them relentlessly. In turn, you become more attuned to your customers’ pain points and better position yourself to appeal to them. As your business grows, this boosts your reputation, brand equity and ultimately attractiveness against the backdrop of competitors.

Hitting the pricing sweet spot is about finding the balance between profit and value. Prices influence what types of customers you attract, how many of them will end up paying, and how your product is perceived. Understanding where your customers stand reduces potential mistakes, giving you an idea of how high you can go before you become unreasonable.

Don’t dismiss separating your customers into smaller categories. For example, you might segment your customers based on who lives in San Diego, those who have a job title of president or those on a premium plan. You could combine them together and segment all premium plan company presidents who live in San Diego, for example.

You’d never say that “we don’t need to improve”. Even if you do turn a healthy profit, you can always do better. Similarly, your segments should not be static – as your customer base changes, customer expectations shift, you need to revisit and adjust your segments.

Make product decisions based on actual information, not guesswork. Segments give you important customer data to stand on. Even if it doesn’t impact your operations or strategy, you’ll always have solid reason to perform a change, no matter how small.

Think your customer service needs improvement? Start working on segmentation. Carefully crafted profiles give you incredible amounts of information and context for every customer. This allows you to address concerns before they arise and make every customer service interaction a special one.

Customer profiling isn’t just for marketers. Decisions should be made based on data-based facts, including customer feedback. Share segments and customer information not only with your marketing or customer service departments, but with retention, product development and upper management. Give everyone the freedom to make decisions with the customer in mind.

You don’t necessarily need pricey CRM or customer profiling software to start segmenting your users. In fact, you can do it all with help desk software that offers customer as well as staff segmentation. Here are some ideas for constructing your customer segments:

• By request type
  Example: You need to separate your retail customer requests from IT help desk requests.
• By demographic
  Example: You need to segment users by age, income, marital status, children, and so on.
• By behaivor
  Example: Sort users by their time-based preferences, purchasing power, price sensitivity.
• By profitablity
  Example: You need to distinguish customers that spend less from those that spend more.
• By geography
  Example: Arrange customers by time zone, language, or geographical characteristics.
• By psychographic
  Example: You need to segment customers based on your own survey results.

In addition, you can limit customer access to your user and self-service portal. Restrict certain areas of your community, create a paywall or offer premium content to your most valuable customers:

• Limit user portal content to different users
  Example: Make your user portal viewable to all registered users, but have a hidden area limited to users from the VIP Customers group.
• Create a temporary beta-tester user group
  Example: Create a temporary product testing page that allows users of all types to share their feedback, questions or ideas.
• Create a paywall
  Example: Useful if you want to offer additional collaboration options, content, video, or documentation to a select few users.

Does it make sense to get emails from Acme Guitars and Acme Phones in one pile? Of course not. You’d want to differentiate from requests originating from different companies.

If you are a business that offers a range of different brands to your customers, or if you want to be a B2B support star, you need to sort users by organization they belong to. Customer service software by Helprace also allows you to automatically add users to organizations based on the domain they use to contact you.

Read More: Glorious Support with Teams, Groups & Organizations

With billions and billions of people in the world, with all of us having different tastes, values and goals, it pays to know what category your customers fall into.

And customer segmentation helps companies discover what sets apart their most valuable users (how they interact with their product offering) and attract more of them. It focuses on the high-rollers, power users, big spenders – or anything else you can think of!

With correct profiles in place, you’ll be able to send targeted messages, route and escalate requests, all based on a particular customer group. You can assign or remove users from groups automatically, too!

Tags: customer service