Segment configuration maintenance overview
Many social housing providers are now focusing on understanding their customers better, using campaign segmentation to help them provide services more effectively and strategically to those that will most benefit. A segment is a subset of contacts or contact groups who share one or more characteristics, and is therefore the method by which campaigns are targeted to the right audience, matching their needs, priorities and expectations. Segmentation enables a housing organisation to more fully understand the behaviours and aspirations of its tenants, thus informing the implementation and delivery of new services through the campaigns process. Defining the cohort of contacts to be included within a campaign segment is achieved through the creation of one or more statement rules. For each statement rule created, an entity and matching condition is required to control the desired result: the available entities - system data fields - are those relevant to the target audience subset for the campaign segment i.e. Contact or Contact Group; the desired condition is controlled by standard expression symbols. Any number of statements can then be combined using AND / OR operators to obtain the expected outcome. Where the criteria used to deliver a specific cohort of contacts - the campaign segment - needs to be amended, the breadth of required changes is an effective guide in determining whether to edit the existing statements or simply to start from scratch. The option to remove all existing criteria can often be easier than applying significant changes to legacy statements, particularly if the end user tasked with applying these changes did not devise the original rules i.e. it is more likely to achieve the desired outcome. Similarly, where a SQL stored procedure is to be employed to extract the required segment instead of the original criteria algorithm, the removal of the redundant rules is therefore a straightforward first step in the process.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of segment configuration maintenance, including: