From HBR Blog Network:

A New Framework for Customer Segmentation

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/06/a_new_framework_for_customer_s.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

“A new kind of segmentation based the combinations of jobs that customers need to get done. Here’s how the “jobs done” segmentation works:

Step #1: Identify the contexts in which customers are using the company’s products. Examples of such jobs in the mobile telco realm might include: “being in touch with family and friends while roaming,””choosing the best entertainment and dining opportunities on the go over the weekend” and “becoming more confident and secure in the use of a smartphone.” A mobile service provider using multiple research techniques might find that there are fifty or more jobs to be done across their customer base. One person might typically get several jobs done by a given provider or brand.

Step #2: Combine information about transactions and customer behaviour in the contexts to describe each of the jobs to be done. For our weekend entertainment example, we would look for a combination of weekend searches for entertainment information, searches for local restaurants, movie reviews and social behaviour such as tweets about movies, concerts or restaurants. The “becoming confident and secure” job might use data from call centre interactions and detect unused features on a new smartphone. The actual relevant data for each of the “jobs to be done” is selected during the initial research as a function of the different contexts to be explored and the data available. This is very different from traditional behavioral segmentation which focuses on a wide set of individual variables such as the percentage of voice calls. Here we need a holistic view of the data required to characterize a context.

Step #3: Map individual customers to jobs, using the data. Each customer would be scored according to the relevance for him or herself of each of the jobs done. A specific customer may need 20% of the entertainment job, 2% of the confidence job and 40% of the being-in-touch job. The customer profiles would be spread across all jobs. From there it’s a simple step to cluster customers on their mix of jobs to be done rather than on their “raw” behaviour, demographics or attitudes. For each segment, there may be only three or four jobs to be done that are crucial. This then allows the development of specific solutions for each segment.”

Stephen