Customer segmentation

We've held national user panels for some years but have always mixed a wide range of customers together. The aim has been to verify our view of our performance and services and, at the same time, to 'run' our new ideas across our customer base and gain valuable feedback in advance of their release.

This year the aim has remained the same but we have started to segment customers, so that similar and like-minded customers are gathered together and can give us a much more focused view. This has been really useful and successful. Groups of, for example, lenders, large conveyancing firms and high street solicitors have differing views and interests and we've been better able to extract those views and react to them.

We intend to develop this further in 2007 by moving to more qualitative methods of customer research - moving away from our annual one-size-fits-all survey. It's all part of our drive to become more reactive to what customers need us to deliver.