Clustering in Tableau - Real Business Scenario

Scenario Mode

👤 Your Role: You are a sales analyst at a retail company.

📋 Request: Your manager wants to identify groups of customers with similar buying behaviors to target marketing campaigns better.

📊 Data: You have customer purchase data including Customer ID, Total Purchase Amount, Number of Transactions, and Average Basket Size.

🎯 Deliverable: Create a Tableau dashboard that uses clustering to segment customers into meaningful groups and visualize these clusters.

Sample Data

Customer ID	Total Purchase Amount	Number of Transactions	Average Basket Size
C001	1200	15	80
C002	300	5	60
C003	1500	20	75
C004	700	10	70
C005	200	3	67
C006	1800	25	72
C007	400	7	57
C008	1300	18	72
C009	600	9	66
C010	250	4	62

1

Step 1: Connect your customer purchase data to Tableau.

Use 'Connect to Data' and select your data source containing Customer ID, Total Purchase Amount, Number of Transactions, and Average Basket Size.

Expected Result

Data is loaded and visible in Tableau's Data pane.

2

Step 2: Create a scatter plot to visualize customer purchase behavior.

Drag 'Number of Transactions' to Columns and 'Total Purchase Amount' to Rows.

Expected Result

Scatter plot shows customers distributed by transactions and purchase amount.

3

Step 3: Add clustering to segment customers.

Click 'Analytics' pane, drag 'Cluster' onto the scatter plot, and let Tableau suggest clusters.

Expected Result

Customers are grouped into clusters with different colors.

4

Step 4: Adjust cluster settings to use 'Average Basket Size' as an additional variable.

In the cluster configuration, add 'Average Basket Size' as a variable for clustering.

Expected Result

Clusters update to reflect similarity across three variables.

5

Step 5: Create a dashboard to display the cluster visualization and customer details.

Add the scatter plot with clusters and a customer details table to a new dashboard.

Expected Result

Dashboard shows clusters visually and lists customers with their cluster assignment.

Final Result

Clusters Dashboard

+---------------------------------------+
| Scatter Plot: Number of Transactions  |
| vs Total Purchase Amount (colored by |
| cluster)                             |
|                                       |
|   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   |
|   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   |
|                                       |
+---------------------------------------+
| Customer Details Table                 |
| Customer ID | Cluster | Total Purchase|
| C001       | 1       | 1200          |
| C002       | 2       | 300           |
| ...                                   |
+---------------------------------------+

✓Customers are grouped into 3 clusters based on purchase amount, transaction count, and basket size.

✓Cluster 1 includes high-value customers with many transactions and large basket sizes.

✓Cluster 2 includes low-value customers with fewer transactions.

✓Cluster 3 includes medium-value customers with moderate transactions and basket sizes.

Bonus Challenge

Add a filter to the dashboard to allow users to select clusters and see only those customers.

Show Hint

Use Tableau's filter action on the cluster field to enable interactive filtering.