Know who your customers are – part 2

Thanks to the readers that pointed out that some stores ask for postal code or zip code at the point of sale. Postal codes can help refine customer identification to those in living in a specific locality (or even as in the UK a cluster of houses on a street). This can be linked to published demographic data and helps give a picture on the type of customer likely to have made the purchase. It’s not foolproof (I, for one, have lived in areas that didn’t match my socio-economic grouping!) but is better than nothing.

If you have customer details available in your data warehouse you can potentially do two things: track sales to that customer over time, and classify the customer based on customer attributes, i.e. create customer hierarchies and hence aggregations. Typical customer attributes could include address locality, age group, income sector, and marital status. Similarly for a business-to-business trader "business type" could be a good attribute to use; for a wholesale vegetable market it may be useful to compare sales made to hotels, restaurants, and senior citizen homes.

Again, the problem of how to acquire the data is present, how do you get a customer to tell you how many kids they have when they have only come into the store to buy a can of beans?

Next part 3 – keep it clean, guys!