Customer segmentation
Description
Customer segmentation refers to the mobility of the Swiss resident population in the submarkets (1) leisure travel for everyday purposes, (2) day trips with private purposes and (3) trips with overnight stays with private purposes. There is a focus on trips and travel by rail. This study categorises trips connected to a multi-local lifestyle – where people regularly visit, for example, vacation homes or apartments, relatives or friends, or partners living in a different location – as leisure traffic or travel in this study because they occur for private, non-commercial reasons and can involve considerable annual traffic. Trips for business purposes have been excluded because they feature different work-related reasons and require separate customer segmentation.
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Survey respondents were persons between the ages of 16 and 85 pertaining to the resident population of Switzerland in the German- and French-speaking parts of the country. It was assumed that people in this age range were largely free to make mobility decisions for lei-sure and travel. The formation of customer segments was limited to the group of rail users. At the end of 2012, this was a total of 4.5 million people in the resident population of the German-speaking and French-speaking parts of Switzerland (meaning there were 1.7 million non-customers in these parts of the country). The criterion for rail use was at least one rail trip in the 12 months prior to taking the survey. The field period was from 21 January 2013 to 31 March 2013. Respondents were selected using address data (telephone numbers) provided by the commissioned survey institute LINK (Lucerne). The survey was conducted in two stages. The first stage involved randomly selecting a household, extracting individual information on the structure of the household. The second stage involved randomly selecting a person from each household to be interviewed in detail about their mobility style. This second stage was followed by screening persons based on the criterion of rail use in the last 12 months, enabling recruitment of the group of rail users to be surveyed in detail. Respondents were free to conduct the main survey by either telephone or online, with 43% of interviews conducted by telephone (57% online). The coverage rate at the household selection stage was 73%. At the second stage, coverage of target persons in a broader sense (users and non-users of railways) was 89%. Among the group of rail users, it was 85%. The combined response rate across all survey levels was 56%. With rail users as target persons, 1,235 full interviews were realised (from 2,594 household interviews). The mean duration of the telephone interviews was 26 minutes (median 25 mins), and that of the online survey was 35 minutes (median 23 mins).