Customer groups

Overview

Customer group is a data model in Blueshift that can be used to support households and multiple customer identities with shared attributes. In this model, different customer profiles are linked to a common parent entity called a group.

Use Cases

Streaming Platforms

Each account on a streaming platform would correspond to a group in Blueshift and each profile under an account would correspond to a customer profile. A group would have the account contact and billing information while each customer profile under the group would have details specific to each user for example preferences and contact information.

Cell Phone Plans

Similarly for a mobile service provider, a group can be used to represent a billing account while a customer profile can be used to represent each individual under the group plan.

Enterprise Marketing

In the B2B space, a group can be used to represent a prospect or lead (e.g. a company or organization) while customer profiles under the group can represent the different contact persons for that organization.

Identity Management

Sometimes a single individual can have multiple identities e.g. multiple email addresses with which they have signed up for different services from a given brand. In such situations, the group can be used to represent the individual while customer profiles under the group can be used to represent the different identities of the individual.

Concepts

Group vs Customer Attributes

A group has a few standard attributes:

• Group ID
• Email
• Phone
• First Name
• Last Name

In addition, you can provide as many custom group attributes as necessary for your use case. For example for a household type model you could have group attributes like

• Subscription start date, subscription end date, household income, etc
• Statuses such as bill paid, renewed subscription, overages, etc.

A group can have one or more customers. The group details page shows the information about group members.

Group level attributes apply to every customer that is a member of the group whereas customer attributes are limited to a specific customer only. During segmentation, you can segment customers both on customer attributes and on group attributes and statuses.

For example, users C1 and C2 have individual attributes and shared group (G1) attributes.

Group vs Customer Events

When the group feature is enabled, events get classified as group or customer events.

• Events with group_id are treated as group events and are associated with all the customers in that group. These events can be seen on the group profile page and on the customer profile pages for all customers present in that group (based on the group_id passed in the payload).
• Events with just the customer_id (or email_id) are treated as customer events and get associated with only a specific customer.

The above figure shows a group (G1) event and its association with all the members (C1 and C2) in the group.

The above figure hows a customer (C1) event. Note that it’s associated with the customer C1 only and not with any other member (C2) belonging to the same group (G1).

Setup

You will first need to contact your CSM to enable the customer group feature for your account. You can then create groups, add users to groups and create group transactions by firing the below mentioned events on BSFT.

The following sample payloads are for illustration purposes only. You must modify these as per your use cases.

Create a new group

{
"firstname": "Name1",
"phone_number": "+333333333",
"event": "group",
"group_id": "g1"
}
 

Add a user to an existing group 

{
"customer_id": "g1id1",
"firstname": "g1Name1",
"phone_number": "+4444444444",
"event": "identify",
"group_id": “g1"
}
 
 

Publish a group transaction

Prerequisite: Contact support@blueshift.com to add or update a transaction configuration for a customer group transaction.

Here is an example of adding a transaction configuration.

{
                          :id => 1,
                   :account_id => 15,
                       :user_id => 1,
             :description => nil,
              :transaction_name => "lds",
                          :event => "lead_initial",
       :user_exclude_attributes => [],
      :group_exclude_attributes => [],
     :transaction_id_attributes => [
         "lead_id"
     ],
       :transacton_id_delimiter => "-",
     :transaction_resource_type => "group",
                       :version => "2",
                        :active => true,
              }
 

Publish a group transaction

{
"event": "lead_initial",
"lead_id": "g1L1234567",
"affiliate_id": "AID123",
"buyer_count": 5,
"score": 10,
"group_id": "g1"
}

Advantages

For household use cases, groups allow you to:

• Get a summary view of all customers in a household (e.g. billing_account_number)
• Report on campaign activity both at the household level (e.g. billing_account_number) and at the individual level (e.g. email or customer_id)

For identity management use cases, groups allow you to:

• Manage spam/hard bounces at the individual level (e.g. account_number) in addition to the doing so at the identity level (e.g. email)
• Apply messaging limits at the individual level (e.g. account_number) instead of doing so at the identity level (e.g. email) 

Edit group

You can use the edit button on the group profile page to edit its attributes.

You can edit a group's standard attributes as well as custom attributes.