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About Customer Hierarchies

A customer hierarchy is a structure that you design for your data that is used to sort data. Customer Hierarchies allow the marketer to design segmentation and filter criteria that take advantage of relationships between individuals or organizations within the customer base. For example, a marketer may want to use a campaign to target individuals within a household or the household that contains several individuals. You can use the customer hierarchical structure to develop segmentation measures and set up custom functions that select customers based on aggregated data across any lower targeting levels of a hierarchy.

You create customer hierarchies to specify how you want to sort and organize information when it is extracted from the data warehouse. For example, a bank might create a hierarchy with customers as the primary targeting level (sort). Each customer most likely will have multiple accounts (second targeting level), and each account will have multiple months of transactions (third targeting level).

This Customer-Account hierarchy allows the bank to deliver a direct offer at the customer (primary) targeting level, or to decide that the best way to deliver an offer is by targeting specific accounts (second targeting level). Each banking customer has multiple accounts, and each account has multiple months of information. A measure might be created to target a customer based on the combined balances or transaction amounts across accounts.

By using Social Security number (SSN) and Account ID to identify customers and accounts, you can design measures that correspond to the targeting level. For an account-level measure, you can sort the data by Account IDs and calculate measures such as total deposits, average balance, minimum balance, and so on. For a customer-level measure, you can sort by SSN. Within the SSN group, you can sort by Account ID. The customer-level measures can then aggregate the data across multiple accounts, such as total balance, number of transactions, and so on. You can use those measures to create segment and filter criteria.

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 Siebel Marketing Guide, Version 7.5, Rev. A 
 Published: 18 April 2003