Segmenting and differentiating customers based on levels and expectations

What does segmenting of customers mean

Segmenting your customers refers to grouping your customers based on some criteria for identification. For example, you might want to segment your customers into those currently trialing product, having more than 100 users, and so on. Segmenting is done, so you can customize the conversations with certain type of customers on scale. For instance, you can build an exclusive segment for the trial users of your product and trigger a set of onboarding messages to them, whereas have a completely different set of existing customers to whom you can send out feature update messages and so on.

Creating customer segments

Most live chat tools and help desk tools allows you to create customer segments at a click of a button. For example, these tools even come with predefined segments to specifically showcase your new users, active users, or even the ones that are inactive for quite some time (in other words, likely to churn)

Here are some suggestions on the different segments you can create to differentiate your customers and personalize conversations accordingly.

Premium customers - The customers segmented into this category can be the ones that have subscribed to your highest plan or are among the highest revenue contributors. Customers in this category need to receive the best possible service and be treated with priority.
Free trial users - The customers in this segment are the ones that can prospectively be converted into paying customers. Your support team can help these customers make the most of your product features, and help them with use cases showing how the product can help them in accomplishing their goals.
Users of free/basic version- The customers in this category are usually active users of your product but might be approaching a threshold. For example, they might be close to exhausting their space. The messaging to these customers can be along the lines of the options they have to upgrade.

Your segmentation need not always be based on revenue, it can be based on region, timezone, customers needing multiple touches or a few touches or anything that helps you personalize customer conversations.

Enabling customer success

Segmentation brings in an element of simplicity to your customer support by providing an opportunity to target better. You can assign the right support agents based on the technicality of issues in each segment to ensure the best support experience. And to improve the speed of responses, using chat tools like Freshchat can help you in creating relevant canned responses that can be used for each segment.

Once you set up the right segments, it becomes easy to follow the progress of your customers and encourages your team to enable your customers in their goal pursuit. By tracking the activities of customers in each category, your customer success managers can improve their overall experience. For example, with regular nudges your customer success managers can onboard them better, improve product adoption, identify potential upselling and cross-selling opportunities and more.

Next topic - Aligning customer support and customer success team together

What next?

Keys to multilingual support

As your organization grows and you start serving multiple geographies, there is an absolute need to offer multilingual customer support. While the need for multilingual support is established, let us look at the key aspects you need to know to succeed in offering multilingual support.