Bookshelf v7.5.2: Designing Customer Hierarchies

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Designing Customer Hierarchies

Siebel Marketing allows you to design whatever hierarchy is most appropriate for the data in your data sources. You can set up multiple hierarchies to accommodate different customer categories or industry segments in which you may compete.

Using Siebel Marketing, you can define hierarchies of up to seven targeting levels. When presenting campaign offers, you can target the most appropriate level in the hierarchy, making sure that only one, consistent offer is delivered to the customer.

NOTE: You should design and implement customer hierarchies before creating any measures, because some measures may be specific to a customer hierarchy.

Before creating your customer hierarchies in Siebel Marketing, you should analyze your needs and design the hierarchical structure. For example, you might want the following structure to target customers by location:


First Targeting Level	Second Targeting Level	Third Targeting Level	Fourth Targeting Level	Field
Country
	State or Province
		City
			Street Address	Zip Code or Postal Code

A country can contain many states or provinces, cities, street addresses, and postal codes.

A state or province can contain many cities, street addresses, and postal codes.

A city can contain many street addresses and postal codes.

A street address can have only one postal code.

To design a customer hierarchy

Determine the customer hierarchies you need by identifying the ways you and others want to sort your data and the types of aggregations you need.

Each customer hierarchy must have at least one targeting level and can have a maximum of seven.

For each customer hierarchy, define the primary sort (first targeting level), the secondary sort (second targeting level), and so on.

First define the lowest targeting level in your hierarchy. The lowest level has a one-to-one relationship to your data. There can only be one unique value for a particular record. For example, a street address can have only one postal code.

Define the highest targeting level in your hierarchy. The highest level has the highest one-to-many relationship to your data. Many records can have this value. For example, in an address record, the highest sort might be based on country.

Define targeting levels in between the lowest and highest in your hierarchy. These levels have a one-to-many relationship to your data.

For each targeting level, identify which tables and fields hold the data on which you need to sort. Each level must be associated with one or more tables and fields.

For a sample hierarchy design with multiple customer hierarchies, see Table 19.