Why is Customer Segmentation Important For Online Customer Services?

Posted by Amal A.
1
Jan 22, 2014
1043 Views
Image Customer segmentation is the act of dividing customers in different categories. Numerous strategies are then devised and employed to cater the needs of each category. Customer segmentation is an essential act of the marketing and customer service department of any business association whether small scale, large scale, retail or online.

Why Do You Need Customer Segmentation?

It is indeed a well-known fact that not all the consumers are the same and treating them equally is the biggest mistake any business developer can make. Customer segmentation allows you to categorize your consumers according to many criteria. Mainly, you categorize your customers based on their needs and demands. That is done after determining the area to which your customer belongs, the age group or the status of the consumer. Other factors such as taboos and beliefs of the customers are also taken into account. Customers are also segmented based on their shopping pattern and behavior. Segmentation is important as it allows you to adopt different marketing approach towards varying degrees of customers. You devise your strategies of customer management based on their needs in order to compel more and more customers towards you. Customer service in Dubai, in particular, must employ customer segmentation as it is a cosmopolitan city housing people from varying cultures.

Treating two consumers, with different beliefs and demands, equally can also turn customers against you. For example, you cannot market bacon to a customer who belongs to an area where eating pork is considered a taboo. Similarly you cannot market products designed for youngsters to aging customers. This will offend customers making them turn against you. Customer segmentation lets you to reach out to different kinds of customers and allows you to expand your horizons. This in return lets you market your products effectively and provide maximum customer convenience to ensure increased sales and profits.

Customer Segmentation for Online Customer Services


As mentioned above, customer segmentation is essential for all kinds of mediums. Whether you are dealing with customers on the telephone or through live chat, you need to keep available, different strategies in order to ensure best customer service. Online operators have an added advantage of having an access to the personal data of the customers. They can also check how many times a customer visits a page and how many products a customer views. They can find out the area to which a particular customer belongs by tracking the IP address. By doing so, they can handle that customer according to the strategy devised for that particular category of customers. For example, you track a customer belonging to a South Asian country surfing through the page of makeup foundation, clicking on two or three items again and again while putting none on the shopping cart. You deduce that the customer is a probably a female who happens to be an indecisive customer. You can adopt a proactive strategy here and approach the customer, offering her your help. Keeping in view the age group, skin type and area of the customer, you can help customer in deciding which foundation to pick and why. Similarly if you see a customer putting multiple products on the cart and you deduce the customer is an impulsive buyer, you can place more attractive offers in front of the customer.

Any marketing regime or customer management strategy will fail badly without customer segmentation. Hence it is one of the key ingredients for making any business successful.
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