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Build customer segments to focus prioritization

The two types of customer segment, static and dynamic, and how to use them to prioritize Discoveries

Written by Marina Salmon

A segment groups users or companies by a criterion that matters to your prioritization: customer tier, geography, plan, industry, lifecycle stage.

There are two types, and they differ only in how membership is decided:

  • Static segments: you choose who is in them, one by one, in bulk or at import time. They appear under Segments in the Customers sidebar.

  • Dynamic segments: you write a rule once, and Harvestr keeps the membership up to date as your customer data changes. Available from the Scale plan.

Everything downstream works the same for both: filters, feedback counts, and the segment chips on your Discoveries.

What a segment is

You can create user segments and company segments, and a customer can belong to as many as you like.

Segments and customer attributes are not the same thing.

Segments are groups you define inside Harvestr. They can't be synced from your CRM, and they're available as Discovery filters out of the box.

Customer attributes are fields that can be synced from your CRM. To filter Discoveries on them, you build Rollup fields. A dynamic segment is the bridge between the two: its rule reads your attributes and turns them into a segment you can filter on.

Creating a static segment

From the Customers section

Create segments manually from the Customers section.

From a customer profile

You can also create a segment on the fly while editing a user or company.

In bulk, from a spreadsheet

The multi-object import creates segments and assigns them to customers in one pass, the fastest way to set this up the first time.

Assigning a static segment

Four ways, depending on volume:

  • In the import file: the column does the work

  • In bulk from the Customers section: select users or companies, click Add segment

  • One by one: from a user or company profile

  • Through the API: send the segments field when you update a customer, see below

Keeping segments up to date through the API

Both Update a user and Update a company accept a segments field, so your own systems can keep segments in step without anyone opening Harvestr.

Pass the segment names as a list of strings, for example "segments": ["Enterprise", "EMEA"]. Good to know:

  • The list replaces what the customer had. Sending an empty list clears their static segments, and leaving the field out changes nothing.

  • Names are matched without regard to capitals, and a name your workspace doesn't have yet is created as a new static segment.

  • Dynamic segments are never affected: naming one does nothing, and leaving one out never removes it. Their membership belongs to their rule.

The same segments field exists on the create endpoints, so a customer can arrive with its segments already set.

Dynamic segments: let a rule do the work

Customer attributes are refreshed every night from your CRM, but a static segment is not: the day a customer moves from Growth to Enterprise, your Enterprise segment quietly goes stale. A dynamic segment solves that by defining the group with a rule instead of a list.

Dynamic segments are available from the Scale plan. On Core, you can still create and assign segments by hand, as described above.

Creating one

  1. Go to All Users or All Companies.

  2. Click Add filter above the list, and build your conditions. The list filters as you go, so you can check who matches.

  3. Click Save as segment, give it a name, and save.

The new segment appears in the sidebar under Dynamic segments. Its counter shows a dash until Harvestr has computed it for the first time.

What a rule can say

  • Up to 6 conditions, combined with a single And or Or for the whole rule

  • Conditions on text, number and yes/no attributes: contains, exactly matches, is greater than, is empty and so on

  • Conditions on your static segments: has all of, has any of, has none of

  • Text comparisons ignore capitals

To change a rule, open the segment, edit the filters and click Save. Removing every condition deletes the segment, and Harvestr asks you to confirm before it does.

How often it refreshes

Membership is recomputed, not live:

  • right away when you save the rule

  • about a minute after somebody changes a customer, in Harvestr or through the API

  • at the end of each CRM sync, for the segments that use the attributes it updated

  • once a day, for everything

A large import converges over several minutes rather than instantly.

What you cannot do with them

  • Add or remove a customer by hand. The rule decides, so dynamic segments never appear in the Add segment menus, and an import or API call that sets segments leaves them untouched.

  • Turn a static segment into a dynamic one, or the other way around. Create a new one and point your filters at it.

  • Delete an attribute or a static segment that a rule uses. Harvestr blocks it and names the dynamic segments concerned.

  • Build a rule on another dynamic segment.

Using segments to prioritize

This is where the setup pays off. Filter your Discoveries to only those containing feedback from a given segment, and "what are our Enterprise accounts actually asking for?" becomes a two-click question. Static and dynamic segments work the same way here.

With a segment filter active, the feedback column switches to counting only the feedback from that segment, so the ranking you see reflects that audience, not your whole base.

Inside a Discovery, you also see how many customers from each segment are attached to it via their feedback.

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