Valued Customers

Does it really matter if a customer is "Hight Value" or "Low Value"?

This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately. For years there has been a continued effort on the part of most every company to identify who their most "valued" customers are and then treat them with a different level of service. Whether it be being part of an airline club, a credit card brand or a customer on amazon, many companies have segmented their service by who is more "valuable" to them.

My question is whether or not that segmentation in service is still an intelligent strategic practice for a customer service group and ultimately a company.

There is no doubt that there is value in segmenting your customers to learn more about their buying habits or to group customers together based on trends or offers that the company believes will be value to the customers. But with customers becoming more a part of the dialog in how they get serviced and ultimately leading the dialog on how that service made them feel, is it really still smart to give a lower quality of service to the "low value" customer?