Do you have to use a customer or item group when setting up advanced next order status preferences?

I am trying to set up Next Status Preference override so that when we ship confirm, orders for a specific customer will go to a different status. This customer wants ASN's but has some interesting requirements, so we want to run a custom job to populate some custom tables before the ASN (R47032) executes. We wanted to set up a next status preference for this customer so that their orders would go to a different status at ship confirm, which we could then use in the data selection for our custom process followed by running R47032 with a status bump