The precise Winston Churchill quote is, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” The relevance is that accommodating change is the heart of reference-based keying systems.
End consumers are constantly changing and the various identification elements also are constantly in flux – address changes, name changes, and household composition changes, for example. How does the modern retail bank keep up with these changes? Fortunately, reference-based keying systems have a mechanism for doing just that.
First, any good reference-based keying solution is constantly adding newer identity data, since it helps improve its ability to relate all the various identification elements to a person. These additions often will lead to new associations and connections between identities. Second, a reference-based solution should have a mechanism for delivering these changes to you. Third, in order for your customer database to stay up-to-date, you will have to have a process for accepting changes to identities.
Here is an example: you have a prospect named Chip Consumer who lives at 123 Main Street. The reference database has Jon Consumer as 123 Main Street (Key #123456), but does not find Chip Consumer. Therefore, it will generate a new key for Chip Consumer (#777777) and save it separately. After all, this could be a brand new identity or it could be a variant of an already keyed identity – there is no way to know yet. Therefore, in your prospect database you use key #777777. A couple of weeks pass and the reference database gets some new information – Chip Consumer is really Jon Consumer (perhaps Chip is a childhood nickname). It will now add Chip Consumer as a variant of key #123456 since it is the same person. This is a brand new relationship. The reference database has to send some sort of update to you so you can benefit from this new information. It does this with a “was-is” record. In this example the update would say “the key that was #777777 is now #123456”. In this way, you can interact with Chip Consumer knowing that he is actually Jon Consumer.
A good reference-based keying solution will always try to improve itself by adding new data. It should have a clear and easy mechanism for tracking, recording and delivering new relationships to you so that you can benefit and your systems can take the next best action for the relationship. In this way, your view of your customers will be in a state of constant improvement.
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