Leveraging Segments for Service Levels – RetentionX

Thanks to the strong relationships your service reps build with customers, they are uniquely positioned to foster loyalty and value. That way, the level of support your brand provides has a significant impact on your growth and success.

But the more you grow your brand, the more diverse customers with specific needs you will attract. With RetentionX, you are able to understand the quality of each and every customer you have, allowing you to identify key customers within your growing customer base. This way you can optimize your customer service, exceed your shoppers' expectations and ultimately maximize your customer impact.

So let's take a look at how you can inform your support team about the quality of your customers and therefore the appropriate level of service.

1. Identify customers eligible for higher service levels

The first step is to decide for which customers you want to offer higher service levels. In our best practice example, we decided on three different customer segments and thus support levels:

Standard: You certainly don't want to penalize your customers with poor service. This could seriously damage your brand, as you risk not only losing individual customers, but also negative word-of-mouth effects. Therefore, each customer should receive great support, which represents your standard level of support.
Plus: When dealing with customers who show the potential to become your future high-value customers, it makes sense to increase your efforts. These customers deserve the special attention of your team.
Premium: Then, of course, there are the customers who are already your high-value customers and add the most worth to your brand. These customers are so important to your success that they merit exceptional care.

Let's create the appropriate segments in RetentionX!

Service Level: Premium

To identify the customers who add the most value to your business, it's best to use Customer Lifetime Value. Data shows that the 10% of customers with the highest LTV are responsible for 40% of total revenue; you can assess this using Percentile Analysis. To segment your top 10% customers by LTV, choose the following condition:

Service Level: Plus

Next, we need to identify customers who demonstrate a high potential to develop into such high-value customers. For this purpose, we use the insights of the RFM Analysis and segment all Top Customers, Loyal Customers and High Potentials who do not yet belong to the top 10% by LTV:

Service Level: Standard

Last but not least, all other customers should be grouped in a separate segment:

Feel free to add additional segment conditions to identify customers eligible for higher service levels. However, ensure that the customer segments do not overlap and are distributed in a well-balanced, descending manner.

2. Synchronize your segments with Zendesk

After connecting your Zendesk account to RetentionX, don't forget to select "Segments" to be transferred to Zendesk. This way, the service level will be visible in each customer profile:

3. Define service level objectives

Congrats! Now that we have the segment information in Zendesk, your customer service team gets to see what level of support your customers are eligible for. Whenever they are on the phone with a customer or receive a request, they can immediately understand if special care is required.

To achieve this, it is important to have policies in place that clearly define what a Plus or Premium level of support should look like. Traditionally, the following KPIs are considered when setting service level objectives:

First response time
Resolution time
Customer satisfaction score
Cost per resolution

It may also make sense to have selected service reps assigned to special care customers. With the help of Zendesk's automation options, these tickets can automatically be assigned to the right reps.

4. Monitor Service Level Compliance

After that, monitoring these customer service metrics is important for you to know if you are performing well in comparison to this predefined goal. It does not really matter which specific metrics you chose, but it is essential to respect these agreements. Not evaluating them might let you out of track and some problems might also go unnoticed, delaying the moment you are aware of them and start fixing what has to be.

For this purpose, set up a reporting in Zendesk including those metrics per customer segment. For more details, see our article Best Practice: Analyzing Support KPIs per Segment.

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