Jargon Buster
Data or customer reference date
- What does this mean?
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A record of when a customer or user did certain things in relation to an arts facility.
Ideally this should be recorded as both the date and time for the relevant activity. Clearly there may be many dates that could be recorded for each customer or user, such as: time and date of first contact time and date of first full documentation of the customer’s details time and date of first booking time and date of payment time and date of the event attended time and date of most recent activity (which could well be something other than the most recent attendance – for example, making a refund, sending them some promotional material, or handling an enquiry from this customer).
On balance the most important of these would seem to be the time and date of a customer’s first activity, and this should be obtained and recorded even if the other dates prove unobtainable. See below.
- How did we get this definition?
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To allow detailed analysis to be done, the date of a given customer transaction is frequently useful. For instance, this can enable the plotting of booking patterns in relation to the time of event; or it can assist an analysis of an attender’s status (i.e. are they a current or a lapsed attender?).
However, if an organisation has the benefit of a computerised ticketing system, many transaction times and dates will be recorded as a matter of course, so a range of such dates will be available. Here Stuart Nicolle advocates the value of not only recording the transaction date but also of categorising transactions according to their time.
- Related and similar definitions
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Clearly, if an organisation is dealing with a lot of different date information, it may not be possible for it all to be used. Hence some decisions may have to be made as to which parts of it are most useful.
This sense of usefulness will flow from what exactly an organisation wants to do with the data. For instance, the date of first contact might be helpful in determining how long a customer has been using the organisation (and is thus a measure of their loyalty); and the time of booking and date of the event attended could be used as part of an analysis of typical booking lead-times. But if a decision cannot be made between the various uses, the key date to record would seem to be the date of a customer’s last activity.
This recommendation is made because ‘date of first activity’ is needed for a range of uses, such as: how currently active a customer is (which will thus give their attender or booker how their behaviour relates to any corresponding marketing activity their most recent pattern of activity how long it has been since the customer in question last did
- When to use
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If this data is recorded it can be used: to categorise people according to their attender or booker status; to group and code people as a basis for mailing campaigns; and to develop an understanding of typical patterns of customer loyalty and purchasing behaviour.