Segmentation Sunburst
A hierarchy you can see all the way down. A sunburst draws a hierarchy as concentric rings. The inner ring is the top level, each outer ring subdivides the ring inside it, and every arc's angle is proportional to its share of the whole.
| Segment path | Customers |
|---|---|
| Enterprise / Financial services / Scale | 44 |
| Enterprise / Financial services / Growth | 18 |
| Enterprise / Healthcare / Scale | 31 |
| Enterprise / Healthcare / Growth | 12 |
| Enterprise / Manufacturing / Scale | 29 |
| Mid-market / SaaS / Growth | 96 |
| Mid-market / SaaS / Starter | 34 |
| Mid-market / E-commerce / Growth | 78 |
| Mid-market / E-commerce / Starter | 41 |
| Mid-market / Professional services / Starter | 52 |
| SMB / E-commerce / Starter | 124 |
| SMB / Agencies / Starter | 87 |
| SMB / Other / Starter | 63 |
78% of mid-market revenue sits in two industries, both on the same plan tier - a concentration the segment-level view completely hides.
Model those two industries separately; a single mid-market churn baseline is averaging two very different populations.
What is a segmentation sunburst?
A sunburst draws a hierarchy as concentric rings. The inner ring is the top level, each outer ring subdivides the ring inside it, and every arc's angle is proportional to its share of the whole.
Why is a segmentation sunburst useful?
Customer segmentation is naturally nested - region contains industry contains plan tier. A sunburst shows every level at once and keeps each level's shares summing correctly, which stacked lists of percentages rarely do.
How RetainCLM uses it
Break the customer base down by segment, then by industry, then by plan. Reading outward from a thick inner arc tells you not just that mid-market is large but what it is actually made of.
The chart above is drawn from illustrative demo data chosen to make the visualization legible. It does not describe real RetainCLM customers. On a live account the same chart is drawn from your own customer, usage, billing and support data.
How to read it
Angle is share; distance from the centre is depth. A wide outer arc under a narrow inner one means one sub-group dominates an otherwise small segment - often the most actionable thing on the chart.
Limitations to keep in mind
Outer rings get thin and their labels stop fitting, so a sunburst is really a three-level chart at most. Deep or very uneven hierarchies read better as a treemap or an indented table.
Related concepts
A segmentation sunburst is most useful alongside customer intelligence, revenue retention. RetainCLM builds these views on one unified customer record, so a pattern you notice in one visualization can be followed into the next without exporting anything.
Questions about the segmentation sunburst
What is a sunburst chart?
A radial chart of a hierarchy, drawn as concentric rings where each ring is one level of nesting and each arc's angle is its share of its parent.
When should I use a sunburst instead of a treemap?
A sunburst emphasises the hierarchy itself and works well up to three levels. A treemap uses space more efficiently and is easier to read when you mainly need to compare the sizes of many leaf nodes.
Related visualizations
See a segmentation sunburst built on your customers
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