Segmentation
Customer segmentations are generally carried out in order to treat specific customer groups differently in accordance with their needs and customer value. The intention is to look after customers more profitably and reduce wastage in marketing, sales, and service.
Nevertheless, conventional segmentations according to age, gender, previous sales, or how customers describe themselves, are often only of little use here. They may usually yield very distinct customer segments, but they then possess virtually no relevance in terms of how these customers behave, so that it's impossible to deduce any concrete measures for the company.
Using Behaviour as a Basis for Segmentation
What is crucial in terms of the usefulness of segmentation is how easy it is to assign a new customer to a specific segment, and how clearly it is possible to define meaningful and concrete measures for the individual segments.
This is why classification variables have to be easily measurable so that a customer can be clearly assigned to a segment on the basis of available or easily gatherable data. Moreover, the measures one can deduce from membership of a segment must have a direct link with aspects the company can actually influence.
Thus, for example, a meaningful segmentation in sales can differ wholly from how one would proceed if it were customer service. For these reasons, Vocatus places particular importance when it comes to customer segmentation upon segmenting in a way that is event-driven, specific to people's motives, and based upon their behaviour.
In order to do this, we use already available databank information (data mining) as well as customers' actual current behaviour. The foundation stone for practice-related results is already laid here in the conception of the project and the method of data collection.
Segmenting Dynamically
However, Vocatus goes one step further: we have developed the concept of dynamic segmentation in which customers are continually assigned to various segments as a result of a learning system based upon their respective behaviour.
For this concept, the Federal Association of German Market and Social Researchers (BVM) 2005 awarded Vocatus the Prize for German Market Research.