How do I segment customers?

Overview

Zuora has built in flexibility providing you different ways to segment or group your customers. A segment really can be any attribute on the customer ranging from currency to invoice template. Some common reasons to segment are:

• Group your customers by vertical (for example: b2b, b2c)
• Group by region (for example: EMEA, Americas)
• Group by business unit (for example: Emerging, Strategic)

Zuora standard functionality helps manage batches, gateways, invoice templates, notifications, and currencies for different types (segments) of customers. In addition, custom fields in Zuora are a great way to add external attributes to your accounts for segmenting, among other uses.

Solution

Let's talk about some of the key ways to control functionality for account segments in Zuora:

Batch:  Batches can be used to group certain accounts when processing a bill run or a payment run. In those instances, batches allow for specific behavior to apply to this group of accounts such as whether or not to automatically apply any available credit balance before charging a credit card for payment in a payment run, process specific types of charges, or enter varying invoice dates.

Gateway:  You can define which gateway to use for a specific account.  This means you can group certain customers to process through a specific payment gateway/processor or even customers to process through specific merchant accounts. This capability can be used to control other aspects of payment collections, like the soft descriptor you use in the gateway or you can have different rules such as varying default amounts to use for payment authorizations. To keep things simple, you can use the default gateway for all customers or choose to use a specific gateway on a customer by customer or segment by segment basis.

Invoice Template:  Each account can have a different invoice template for different business requirements. For example, the template can be customized to display varying currency formats, text, or groupings. To keep things simple, you can use the default invoice template for all customers or choose to use a specific invoice template on a customer by customer or segment by segment basis.

Communication Profile:  Similar to the invoice template, the profile allows you to specialize which email templates to use and what notification rules you would like to implement on a customer by customer or segment by segment basis.

Currency:  Currency is often used as a segment for accounting purposes, but all global currencies are supported and you can select a currency for an account.

Depending on your business need, you have the flexibility in Zuora to customize groups of customers with regard to how invoices are presented and emailed as well as how payments are processed. You can choose to configure all of these settings or only specific ones.

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