Does anyone use Custom Role to Segment their members?

Hey @tiffany.oda - I’m just getting started so I don’t have any advice - but wanted to share that I have a similar use case, both for certified users and for new users. 

Following this thread with interest!

We use custom roles to indicate customers vs. non-customers and some internal roles. You can set some of these via login (e.g. the SSO method used) or set as well via API. Agree naming and automated efforts are key to keeping it from getting messy. 

Hi @tiffany.oda We also use custom roles for this. It helps me search the user list, and change ranks and permissions in some cases, but I also sometimes use them as you mention, with exactly the same permissions as a regular user, just as an internal label. 

I can see much more potential for this feature when it’s used this way, especially for automation and reporting.

1. Custom roles for reporting. Exported user reports don’t separate custom roles from other roles, so I can’t sort a spreadsheet by custom role without a lot of other manual work ahead of time to ignore the other roles. I added a custom profile field (user type) for this sorting reason, but it’s essentially a duplicate of the custom roles, which I use for rank change and some permissions.
2. Custom roles in analytics dashboards. I would love to have custom role stats included in my dashboard, so I can see how many users of each type are joining, active, etc. Right now I do this manually (as discussed above).
3. Custom role as trigger for automated actions. For example, I want to automate welcome emails per user type (ie, per custom role) which isn’t possible at the moment.

...so to your original question, using custom profile fields is another way to label users, but I don’t recommend it because they are difficult to edit after you set them up. When you add a new one or edit one, it really creates a mess in your existing users that you have to go in and manually edit, and also sometimes creates a mess in the reports. I found that until now the extra value they add in being able to sort has overcome this, but I’ve definitely spent several tedious hours sorting out user profiles and if I ever have to make another change I may abandon them.

Curious if you are doing anything else with custom roles, or have found any hacks/workarounds to use them for this purpose?