Using Customer Segments

Customer segments are named groups of contacts who share something that matters for support — VIP status, plan tier, region, lifecycle stage, strategic ownership. Once a contact is in a segment, you can use that segment to route their conversations differently, raise their priority, filter inbox views, and report on them separately.

This page covers what segments are, where to manage them, the two ways contacts get into a segment, and how to use them across the rest of the product.

Where customer segments live

Contacts → Segments in the main navigation. The list page shows every segment in the workspace with its current member count. Clicking a segment opens its detail page.

Each segment has two tabs:

Members — the contacts currently in the segment.
Advanced — the auto-apply rule (see below).

Customer segments are distinct from team Groups (Settings → Team → Groups), even though they share the same building block under the hood. Customer segments are about who the customer is; team groups are about which teammates handle the work. The two are unrelated to each other except where you wire them together in a routing rule.

Two ways contacts get into a segment

Manual membership

From the segment’s Members tab, you can add or remove contacts by hand. This is the right approach when membership is small, stable, and driven by something you know about the customer that isn’t in their metadata — for example, a curated VIP list maintained by your customer success team.

Automatic assignment

The Advanced tab has a toggle labelled Automatic customer segment assignment. When it’s on, every time a new conversation is created, the contact behind that conversation is checked against the conditions you’ve configured — and if they match, they’re added to this segment automatically.

The condition builder supports AND / OR logic and operators like equals, not equals, contains, starts with, ends with, in, not in, is empty, and is not empty. The fields you can match against are the standard contact attributes (email, name, company) plus any custom contact properties you’ve defined for your workspace.

Auto-apply runs at conversation creation. It does not retroactively sweep existing contacts when you enable or change the rule — only contacts who arrive after the rule is in place will be auto-added. If you need an existing contact in the segment, add them manually.

A contact can be in any number of segments. Manual and automatic membership are not mutually exclusive: an auto-applied contact can still be removed manually, and a manually-added contact stays put regardless of the auto-apply rule.

What segments are used for

Routing

Segments are first-class conditions in the queue builder on the routing settings page. A queue can match on customer segment alongside (or instead of) topic, channel, and other attributes — for example, Route any conversation where customer segment is VIP to the VIP Support team, with general support as the fallback.

Priority

Priority rules use the same condition builder, so segments work there too. Tagging every conversation from the Enterprise segment as High priority is one rule, and it changes the pull order out of queues so those conversations are handled first when capacity opens up.

Inbox views

Customer segment is a filter in saved views. You can spin up a “VIP inbox” or an “Enterprise tickets only” view by filtering on segment membership.

Reporting

Analytics dashboards expose segment as a group-by, so you can compare first response time, resolution time, CSAT, and volume across segments. This is the answer to questions like Are VIPs getting faster follow-up than the median? or Are trial users escalating more than active customers?

The embedded chat widget accepts a groups array on the context payload — see Chat Widget Setup. Any segment name you pass there is applied to the contact for that conversation, so you can carry a server-side classification (e.g. a logged-in user’s plan tier) into the widget without re-deriving it.

Example segment strategies

High-value customers

Maintain a VIP segment, populated by an auto-apply rule that matches a plan_tier contact property, or curated manually for strategic accounts. Use it in a priority rule to mark every VIP conversation Urgent, and in a queue to send them to a dedicated team.

Lifecycle segments

Auto-apply Trial, Active, and Renewal-risk segments off contact properties you sync from your billing system. Route trial users to a team that’s tuned to convert, and renewal-risk users to a retention specialist team.

Geography-based segments

Auto-apply NA, EU, and APAC segments from a region contact property. Pair with regional team groups so each region’s conversations route to the team that works those hours.

How to design useful segments

Good segments are easy to explain, operationally meaningful, and stable enough to use in routing and reporting. Less useful segments are too narrow to matter, overlap heavily with several others, or aren’t tied to a real support decision.

Best practices:

Start with a small number of segments tied to real workflow decisions.
Prefer auto-apply rules over manual curation when membership can be derived from contact metadata — it stays correct as your customer base grows.
Review segments regularly so old business rules don’t linger.
Use segments together with team groups and escalations, not in isolation.

Common mistakes

Too many segments. Adds complexity without improving any actual workflow.
Segments without an action. If a segment doesn’t change routing, priority, reporting, or review, it’s probably not worth maintaining.
Overlapping definitions. If a contact belongs to several segments that all imply the same treatment, the team stops trusting the setup.