The brief
The Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) commissioned Shift Insight to collaborate on research to gain an in-depth understanding of who their customers are (both members and students) – identifying their attitudes, needs and motivations, and how to best engage with them.
They wanted to develop actionable customer segmentations for students and members to support AAT with achieving their 2030 strategy.
AAT wanted to identify and prioritise key customer segments and provide an in-depth understanding of each segment’s needs, motivations and barriers.
The approach
We used a highly collaborative method, in several stages:
- A workshop to discuss priorities for the survey and segments.
- Two surveys, both approximately 35 questions, with both AAT members and students – which received 1,526 and 2,172 useable responses, respectively.
- Qualitative online interviews were then conducted with a sample of 30 students and 30 members from key audiences across all segments.
- Database linking, combining our new data with the AAT existing customer database.
- Cluster analyses, used to identify 6 member segments and 6 student segments with similar behaviours.
- A workshop on the final segment choices, ensuring they were actionable and useful to AAT.
The value
- Our approach was highly collaborative – we conducted multiple workshops with the wider AAT team, to ensure that all teams involved in the research had the opportunity to influence the outcomes.
- We also developed a report in collaboration with AAT, including detailed profiles of each segment, as well as summaries for comparison between segments. We gave a presentation of results which included wider stakeholders.
- Shift conducted training sessions with AAT on the data and analyses.
- We provided AAT with the data files so they could interrogate the data and explore further relationships between demographics and behaviours.
- Finally, we supplied a pack of ‘golden questions’, allowing AAT to predict segment allocation in future research.
