customer segmentation is a problem that enterprises often face in service marketing. However, there are few enterprises that have achieved real results in customer segmentation. Chinese enterprises have the following problems in customer segmentation.
question 1: it’s just for the sake of segmentation.
this is a typical case of missing goals, which is not rare in the previous enterprise consulting experience. Enterprise managers are often only aware of the need for customer segmentation, but after segmentation, they don’t think clearly or even think about what to do. Just aware of the need for segmentation, began to divide customers, not to mention any systematic segmentation method. Even the state after subdivision is neither used nor updated. Segmentation out of target is often meaningless.
question 2: subdivide according to the type of products purchased
this is a way often used by some enterprises in customer segmentation, which is subdivided according to the products purchased by customers. This kind of segmentation method is to label customers with products, and divide customers by the products they buy and hold. 1n some industries, such segmentation will have certain significance, but in most cases, the service significance of such segmentation is greater than the marketing significance. 1n other words, in this case, the enterprise is not identifying customers, but identifying products. This identification method can not effectively support the customer’s service marketing strategy, but is often used to guide the internal staff how to operate. 1n many cases, such segmentation will bring harm to the customer experience.
question 3: customer segmentation by asset
this is also a common mistake in marketing. Companies often naively believe that customers with high assets will be more willing to buy their products. Some enterprises often use this method to pick out customers with high assets, and then recommend all kinds of new products to these customers frequently, causing customers to be annoyed and even produce negative effects. Affected by financial enterprises, many enterprises are also vigorously applying asset-based customer segmentation. The problem is that even if they find high asset customers, their services and products can not be improved
to a certain extent, customer assets are related to the ability to pay, but they usually do not directly affect customers’ purchase motivation.
question 4: subdivide customers according to natural time
some enterprises simply subdivide customers in the order of first come first served, just like most wine producing areas mark the year of each bottle of wine, the customers of these enterprises often appear with the year
natural time segmentation is also one of the common segmentation methods for enterprises, which is usually used for after-sales service, or to estimate the product retention rate or product maintenance cost of enterprises. Most of the time, it is only applied to the verification process of product after-sales service, which is a defensive countermeasure for enterprises to protect their own interests
some enterprises use the natural time of product purchase to estimate the customer’s product retention time and update time, which is a good application. But fundamentally speaking, this kind of subdivision is for the defensive subdivision of the enterprise itself.
question 5: do not conduct Customer Behavior Segmentation Research
some enterprises rely heavily on customer behavior in the process of providing services and products, but they do not understand the importance of customer behavior, and do not know how to analyze, identify and apply customer behavior segmentation. Often use some simple indicators to replace customer behavior, or even cover up the real customer behavior. For example, some investment institutions will put forward the indicators of customer risk preference, but they can not combine the internal motivation and external factors of customer risk preference, and find that the risk awareness of customers is different in different situations
the failure to understand customer behavior effectively will make enterprises feel confused when applying customer segmentation and taking countermeasures.
question 6: blind segmentation of customer value
customer value is different in different industries and enterprises. Enterprises often do not seriously interpret the connotation of customer value, but blindly segment customers in the name of customer value. And often use some assets, high value products and other external indicators, not the customer’s intrinsic value indicators. There are many problems in this way. More importantly, even if a certain identification problem is solved, it can not support enterprises to implement targeted service marketing countermeasures
the segmentation of customer value usually needs to be combined with the actual data and customer behavior research. Enterprises often lack sufficient understanding here, and simply monetize and capitalize the value.
question 7: invariable one-time segmentation
there are many customer segmentation methods used by Chinese enterprises, but most of them are one-time. Customer segmentation is essentially a continuous process, and more enterprises tend to pay too much attention to the results of segmentation, hoping to get a simple and direct result through a simple method. This is a good expectation, but it is not realistic. This is an important reason why enterprises do not have a good understanding of customer segmentation, lack of investment, and are too radical in the face of the results
Author: Shi Yanjun