Segmentation of customers, products and invoices is what allows the MRR Churn application to take the analysis to a whole new level, from information and discovery to root cause investigation and management action. The purposes of this set of dashboards is to visually compare multiple segments directly against each other with respect to many of the KPIs highlighted in other dashboards. However, it cannot be emphasized enough that segmentation analysis functionality is always just one click away in all the other dashboards as well. The only difference is that those dashboards only allow for a single customer segment or single product segment to be displayed at the same time for a dashboard view, and invoice segments are generally not applicable to those dashboards. So comparisons between different segments on those dashboards would have to be done indirectly (in succession) by changing the selection parameters for the whole dashboard.

By contrast, directly comparing multiple segments within the same segmentation hierarchy against each other is easy and automated in this set of dashboards. Moreover, there is no requirement that every customer or every product be allocated to a segment within a hierarchy. Such flexibility can be useful when a segmentation hierarchy may only be applicable to certain BUs or legal entities in an enterprise environment.

A virtually unlimited number of segmentation hierarchies is possible, but they can be broken down into three basic types: standard, configurable, and customized. Standard segmentation hierarchies are created automatically based on data that already exists in the core MRR Churn application. However, even these may be configurable to the extent of allowing user-editable thresholds for certain quantifiable categories. By contrast, configurable segmentation hierarchies are generally based on data or metadata sources outside of the core MRR Churn application, even though the hierarchies themselves are considered generic/standard to almost all recurring revenue businesses. Finally, customized segmentation hierarchies are also generally based on external data or metadata sources. However, these hierarchies can have a custom ID and name, and they can be entirely based on a very specific, user-defined need that other recurring revenue businesses may never use. The segmentation hierarchies that currently exist or are planned, and what type they are, are listed below: