Strategies for effective customer prioritization

Unless a CS organization is part of an early-stage startup or is part of a small company in a niche market in which the customer bases are very small, it must confront the challenge of how it will prioritize the effort required of it to serve a base of customers that can far outstrip the capacity and capabilities of its team of CSMs. The best way for a CS organization to manage this challenge is to make decisions about how it is going to efficiently utilize its resources of people, time, and money. The exercise is called segmentation and tiering. Segmentation is the process of categorizing customers according to a set of variables, such as revenue, industry, purchase history, and the size of the company. Tiering is the related process for determining how those segments of customers will be treated in terms of the application of CS resources. The typical way CS organizations answer this question is by sorting the segments into customer...