Retail and Corporate Customer Data

Companies generally have two types of customer data - Retail and Corporate. Your retail customers are individuals who have their own houses. Corporate customers are businesses.  There are subtle differences between the two.

Unless you deal exclusively in one or the other, your corporate customer information will have fewer rows than your retail. There are far more ways you can check your retail customers - files like the electoral role or the national deceased register. There are no lists of contacts within businesses that you can reference to check whether your contacts are still working there.

So when approaching the quality of these data sources, the following assumptions should be tested:

• Corporate customers generally bring in more revenue, so more funds may be available for remediation. There may be a greater desire within the business to keep these customers delighted. However, corporate contact data will be much harder to check without going back to the customer.
• Retail customers will have higher volumes of data. There may be less funds available to fix problems, so scale must be considered wisely. Retail data is easier to fix, because there are many more tools available to check and remediate it.

When developing a single customer view, there are significant differences to the structure of the data. Your retail customer has the national insurance number, date of birth, a home address and maybe a correspondence address. Your corporate customer has a name, a job title, a role, perhaps even a level of authority for placing orders, company name, company registered office address, invoice address, delivery addresses. The list is not exhaustive.

Segmenting your data quality approach for corporate and retail customers is one dynamic that must be considered if you are to make an outstanding contribution to your organisation.