In an simple world, a company will have a customer and that customer has an account that links everything to that customer. The real world, however, is often a bit more complex. Especially as organisations and customers grow bigger. In order to keep an overview in an efficient way, it is useful to be able to use a a customer hierarchy within systems.
What is a customer hierarchy
The idea of a customer hierarchy is that you have a tree with with customers that belong to the same parent. For example, you want to see for Microsoft what the figures are by region, but also by country. Or perhaps you want to know what the figures per division are.
With a customer hierarchy you can create an overview of a corporate client. Even if each entity, division or country is billed separately.
Hierarchies in MA!N
Such a structure of clients is often a tragedy to work with in real life. Just try to get all the information organised in a report or to send one statement of account to a group of customers within a hierarchy. For an invoice it’s usually quite simple because it’s addressed to one entity. With a reminder, however, it’s not uncommon that the customer wants one overview for all accounts within the group. In addition, the information is often spread over multiple systems or databases. It is precisely for these reasons that we have made it possible to set up customer trees (hierarchies), at various levels, within MA!N.
In practice, being able to work with a customer hierarchy means that you can view a customer from different angles. For example:
- A sales director can view a customer by starting at a corporate level and zoom in from there.
- A collector can send reminders to group of customers, within a hierarchy, as if it’s one account.
- Credit risk officers can easily determine the exposure and the risk at group level when assessing the risk of an individual customer.
You don’t have to limit the use of hierarchies to MA!N, because MA!N can feed other systems with this data. In this way it can act as a data hub.
Related: MA!N as a data hub for reporting and management information