How to Segment Your Customers for Better Customer Experiences
When people hear “segmentation”, it makes them think of marketing. Marketers segment customers because they want their audience to identify with their marketing material as deeply as possible and ultimately buy their product. Segmentation provides the best, most resonant customer experience for them.
The same applies to customer support.
Segmentation, in the case of support and success, is separating customers based on certain implementation aspects of the product.
For example, in marketing, they typically segment on the type of role or the “jobs to be done”. In support, you can maybe segment on aspects like customer sentiment, revenue from the customer, or even the log activity. Each of these has its benefit and can help improve support, depending on what your end goal is.
Segmenting Based On Customer Experience
In some cases, it’s not who your customers are — it’s where they are in the process of making a decision.
When you segment your customers based on where they are at in their experience of your product, you enable yourself to target much more specifically and carefully than before. Knowing the state of mind that someone is in (regarding your product), can make a huge impact on how satisfied they are at the end of a conversation. You can tailor your responses to how they are feeling.
Customer Journey
Say, you consistently see a lot of questions from customers immediately after they receive their first invoice from you. Wouldn’t it be great to get in front and offer help proactively? Segmenting customers based on the customer journey allows you to take what you know about where people run into trouble with your application or product, and then reach out to customers proactively before they run into trouble. This is useful for a few reasons: first, it lowers your contact ratio, because you are proactively helping customers and fewer tickets are getting through to your inbox. Second, by lessening the load in your inbox, it gives your employees the space that they need to do extra work to continue bettering your customer experience.
It also means that, when tickets do come to your inbox, you know who to prioritize, based on where they are in their journey. For example, you might prioritize a customer who is in the buying section of their journey first or a customer who is likely to churn, over a customer who has not had any trouble lately and seems to be “healthy.”
Sentiment, CSAT, and NPS
How is your customer feeling? Most companies and support teams have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on in their customers’ head. Surveying through CSAT and NPS to understand how satisfied your customers are can be huge in terms of targeting the right customers for the right things. For example, if you have some customers with low CSAT, that might be a great time to give them access to faster or higher-tiered support. If you see a customer with high NPS, it might be time to upsell or ask for a review on a crowd-sourced site.
Machine learning can also help by tagging incoming tickets with the relevant sentiment tag (positive or negative). For instance, if you see someone with a tag that indicates they have low scores in any of these categories, you make the choice to offer them phone service, or a faster SLA, despite traditionally reserving that for customers who pay you more.
It also sets the required context for your support person. When you know that someone is already unhappy, you make efforts to try to make things better rather than worse. So, if they are able to see a whole segment of customers with lower than desired emotional ranking towards the company, they’re able to put on kid gloves and handle these tickets with a bit more delicacy than they would normally.
Based On Industry
When you break your customer-base down to industries, it allows you to customize for specific use-cases and understand how they interact with your product and how they feel about it.
For example, your product caters to multiple wide-ranging industries, but you notice that the machine production industry (3D printing, warehouse assembly line, or small parts production) really vibes with a certain tone in your email communication, both within marketing and support. They also love using chat for customer support and, while they don’t contact you frequently, when they do, it’s usually an emergency. These are good tips that you can then take and apply to other related industries, such as other warehouse-based, or mass-production companies.
Knowing what your customers care about is important to provide great support to them. Understanding the challenges that are associated with a specific industry can help you provide a richer support experience in your tone, contact channels and SLAs.
Based On Behavior
When you segment based on behavior, you take a little bit of the tactics behind sentiment, NPS, and CSAT segmentation, and turn it up. Segmenting users by their behavior involves tracking their actions within your product and then providing support that matches their needs.
Behavioral segmentation works best when done in tandem with another segment, because gaining any kind of meaningful insights with such a large group of customers and little other quantifiable information can be difficult. That being said, behavior can be a very meaningful way to segment for support purposes, specifically proactive support, because you know what they have already seen within your app, and what is still left uncovered.
Using that information to identify customers and educate them on things related to what they are currently working on can be very valuable. For example, if you notice that they are moving things around within their account settings page, you could trigger an email flow that sends them information about account properties and billing.
Similarly, if they frequently ask for phone support, or you notice repetitive behavior within your application, you can use that within your interaction with them, too. Rather than waiting for the push back to have a phone call, hop right on one, or send them more information about the feature that you already know they are having trouble with. Save your agents a little bit of time in the queue.
Based On Price
Segmenting on price makes it easy for your team to prioritize the people who are paying you the most and, hence, would be the most painful to have churn. As Lauren from Box says, “News flash: everyone uses the internet. Small businesses aren’t the only ones clicking on ads. So when building out your [segmentation strategy], what happens when you focus on just the low end of the market?” If you don’t have a sense of how much money is coming to you from each of the people in your inbox, it makes it really easy to lose track of priority individuals who should be getting a bit more of your time.
Similarly, as your company grows, you may consider offering different support tiers. If you have already done that, segmenting based on price within your support inbox is a must.
In Closing
Segmentation can be incredibly powerful when done with intent and a good reason behind it. Figure out where you would like to make the most impact first, and then use the guides above to determine which type of segmentation will be most useful for you and your customers. If you’re trying to focus on proactive support, behavior might be best; if you’re trying to focus on building out support as part of your product offering, segmenting based on price may lead you where you’d like to go. No matter where you go, though, never lose sight of who this is all for— the customer. As long as you keep that in mind, no matter what segmentation you do, it will be a hit.
