By Caryn Maresic, Senior Consultant

Most Data Warehouse designs include constructs for Address, Phone, and/or Email for Customers.   Len Silverston came up with what he calls a Universal Data Model that does a very good job of abstracting address, email and phone number data.   I have seen clients use the Contact Point portion of his model as-is and with a few simplifications with great success.   That being said, in the area of Marketing and Sales, the manner in which we reach out to our customers and prospects gets more diverse every day.   Disneyland has just partnered with Verizon so that park guests can get real time information about the park and play Disney games on their phones....and, of course, Disney gets access to more information about its customers!

How does this new and ever changing world of communication change the way we think about and model contact points?   What would my ”address” look like if I were near the Haunted Mansion looking for a lunch spot?   Would it be different than if I were at Downtown Disney looking for a cup of coffee?   On Main Street looking for Winnie the Pooh?   In all instances I would be using the same phone, possibly the same IP address, but I would be in different locations which would be important to the marketeers at Disney.

As time goes by (and cell phone GPS systems become more accurate) I suspect that the way we run marketing campaigns to smart phones will be similar to the way in which we use billboards today.   Where the customer is physically located at any given time will be as important as the phone number and/or IP address, thus creating a two dimensional contact point.

Have you come across this issue in your organization?   Have you changed your data model to include two dimensional contact points?   If not, has the use of smart phones changed your data model in other ways?

photo by wrayckage via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

Caryn has over 20 years experience in providing high-quality data
solutions to clients in the areas of Business Intelligence, Data
Warehousing and System Integration.   Caryn has expertise in across
industries with an emphasis in Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, and
Insurance.   Prior to joining to Baseline, she ran her own consulting
company.