I ran across a series of posts where David Loshin explores the question: “What is a Customer?” or as he puts it in The Most Dangerous Question to Ask Data Professionals:
Q: What is the most dangerous question to ask data professionals?
A: “What is the definition of customer?”
And he includes some examples:
- “customer” = person who gave us money for some of our stuff
- “customer” = the person using our stuff
- “customer” = the guy who approved the payment for our stuff
- “customer account manager” = salesperson
- “customer service” = complaints office
- “customer representative” = gadfly
and explores the semantic confusion about how we use “customer.”
In Single Views Of The Customer, David explores the hazards and dangers of a single definition of customer.
When Is A Customer Not A Customer? starts to stray into more familiar territory when he says:
Here are the two pieces of our current puzzle: we have multiple meanings for the term “customer” but we want a single view of whatever that term means. To address this Zen-like conundrum we have to go beyond our context and think differently about the end, not the means. Here are two ideas to drill into: entity vs. role and semantic differentiation.
and after some interesting discussion (which you should read) he concludes:
What we can start to see is that a “customer” is not really a data type, nor is it really a customer. Rather, a “customer” is a role played by some entity (in this case, either an individual or an organization) within some functional context at different points of particular business processes. In the next post let’s decide how we can use this to rethink the single view of the customer.
I will be posting an update when the next post appears.