Water Quality Customer Complaints - Differentiating Customers and Locations

It may sound strange to say that we need to "differentiate" between customer records an location records when recording a customer complaint at a particular location. However, this is so important to do as any member of a municipal drinking water lab is very well aware.

There are two main reasons why this is the case:

• The location may not belong to the current resident
• People (customers) move around, perhaps even in the same town

Think of the customer's personal address info as different than the actual location record. The address in the customer's record, is strictly for mailing purposes. The actual "location" record is going to be stored in a separate "Locations" table.  This is because customer John Smith may live at 10 Main St for a time, but then he may move to 5 Ocean Ave. He is the same customer, but the location has changed. If the location was not a separate record in its own table then you could not track a history of the location itself, once John Smith moved out.

Separating customer records from location records allows you to see if the location is really problematic or if certain customers, who may move around, are problematic.

Additionally, many people rent and so while the "customer" lives at a location, the location record will have contact fields which can have a different contact, like the name of the landlord.

A typical customer complaint tracking software package would probably look something like this in order to handle the assignment of both a customer record and a location record:

By keeping the customer records separate and distinct from the location records you can then query on either customer records or location records for historical purposes.