Know who your customers are – part 1

Consider a supermarket data warehouse – you know what was sold, where it was sold and when it was sold, we can even identify what else the customer bought in the same basket. But do we really know who the customer was?

Identifying retail customers at point of sale has always been problematic, other business sectors have less difficulty identifying customers; banks have account numbers, Telcos have telephone numbers; both effectively use an unique reference code to tie transactions to individual customers. Being able to link multiple shopping baskets to an individual or being able to characterise a set of customers by some demographic grouping is gold dust to retailers and their suppliers. Short of asking customers for their names at the sales terminal retailers have devised many techniques to tie customers to their baskets – these include loyalty cards (some even target promotions to the customer based on their buying patterns), credit accounts, delivery services and of course internet shopping.