Customer Dimensions

The children our growing up fast. The elder wanted to go to a concert by a popular beat combo. Sorry, a "Rise Against" gig at the Academy in Birmingham. She had originally arranged to go with friends, however as she was the only one with foresight to get a parent to buy a ticket before the only source became e-bay, she ended up going alone. This in reality meant that I became chauffeur for the 145 mile round trip to the venue. It also meant that I spent about 3.5 hours sitting in the car in a parking lot about 150m from the venue. So, time to catch up on reading and a bit of time to think about a few pieces on dimensional modelling.

Ways to look at customers

Firstly, not all businesses have a sense of customer, many shops are unable tie a specific transaction to an individual; they may know what was bought in a single transaction, but unless the address was captured for delivery, product guarantee, loyalty scheme or, my favourite, nosiness, they have no clue as to whether I shop twice a day or one a year. Other businesses are more fortunate and they know lots about their customers.

One of the most common roll-ups on the customer is a geographic one, we know the address (and for spatial fans, a coordinate in space) and from that we can define hierarchy levels of city, state, region, country, planet and so on.

But alternate hierarchies also exist. Suppose you only had business to business sales then you could categorise by business type for example you sold cleaning supplies, you could classify customers as schools, hotels, offices, contract cleaning companies etc. Or you could divide customers into income, or as one organisation I spoke to recently required, social group (yes my UK friends, a chav hierarchy). The inventiveness of some of these hierarchies is only constrained by the bounds of the law on the holding of personal data.