Data Source

Learn how we process your CRM data

Lexer’s Customer Data Platform ingests data from a variety of sources and one of the most common is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data. Sending Lexer this data allows you to understand the demography of your customers and prospects, their location, and contact information as well as combine it with your other data for an enriched single-customer-view. In this article, we'll walk you through how to integrate your account and which CRM attributes are available.

Integrate your account

First we need to connect your account, which will give us permission to retrieve customer profiles from your CRM platform.

What we do with the data

Once you’ve connected your account, Lexer is able to retrieve your customer and product information to create a set of attributes that you can later query and compare in Lexer.

This is what we do with your data to achieve this:

Auto-validation	We pull the data as a file and check its format, as well as the records in the file, to make sure they can be imported into Lexer.
Validation	We look at the data to make sure it’s what we expect it to be.
Enrichment	We transform your data from its current format into a set of value-add attributes.
Unification	We unify your transaction data to other in your account, as well as third-party data sets.
Import	We take the validated, enriched, and unified data, and import it into the Lexer product.

What we build

Once we’ve retrieved your data, we will build a set of attributes you can query in Lexer. We either import it without transformation, or we change it so you can get more value from it. Here is a list of the attributes we can build with this data.

Standard attributes

Lexer cleans and transforms your data into straightforward representations of the raw data, making it easy for your team to search, analyze, and activate.

Attribute Code	Description	Value
Customer ID	Your internal customer ID.	A customer ID allows you to unify your data across different files and sources.
Email	Customer’s email address.	Email allows us to expand your data universe to third parties.
First name	Customer’s first name.	Names can be used to improve 1:1 communication across sales and service channels.
Last name	Customer’s last name.
Date of birth	Customer’s date of birth.	Birth dates allow you to understand a customer’s age as well as anticipate behaviors around their birthday.
Birth year	Customer’s year of birth.
Address 1	Customer’s street address.	Know where your customers live so you can improve delivery and other in-person service inquiries.
Address 2	Customer’s street address.
Suburb/City	Customer’s suburb/city.	Suburbs allow you understand customers at a demographic level as well as providing insight around geographic distribution.
Postcode/ZIP	Customer’s postal code.	Demographic data sources use postal and zip codes, so this data enables the understanding of behaviors and traits of people living in the area.
State	Customer’s state.	States allow you to understand customers at a demographic level as well as providing insight around geographic distribution.
Country	Customer’s country.	A customer’s country helps you personalize language, understand seasonal trends, and build regional strategies.
Mobile/Cell	Customer’s phone number.	A phone number can be unified to other sources as well as deliver phone-based service interactions.
Gender	Customer’s gender.	A customer’s gender is often useful for basic segmentation, especially when your products are gender specific.

Value-add attributes

Lexer takes all the data you have provided and enriches it, often combining multiple data points to make them more useful than they are on their own.

Attribute Code	Description	Value
Record	Has some sort of relationship with your company.	This is used within the product to run a quick search, highlighting your customer, and prospect universe.
Age	Customer’s age.	Capture the customer’s age at a glance to improve segmentation and service interactions.
Email sha256	Customer’s hashed email address (sha256).	Hashed email addresses can be used to target customers on several online channels without sacrificing the customer’s privacy.
Lives in Country	Customer’s address is within nominated countries - e.g. Lives in Australia, Lives in USA, Lives in England.	A simple flag to highlight the customer’s country.
Closest Store	Customer’s closest store.	If you’re going to direct a customer to a store, we want to make it as convenient as possible.
Geo-location	The Geo-point on a map.	See where one, some, or all of your customers are on a map to better understand where they are.
Inferred Gender	Lexer’s modeled gender, scored against the probability that their first name would be given to a male or a female.	If you don’t capture a customer’s gender, we can help you predict what it is.
Generation	The customer’s generation: the "Lost Generation" are born after 1883, the "Greatest Generation" are born after 1901, the "Silent Generation" are born after 1928, "Baby Boomers" are born after 1946, "Gen X" after born after 1965, "Xennial" are born after 1977, "Millennial" are born after 1984, "Gen Z" are born after 1997, and "Gen Alpha" are born after 2013.	A customer’s generation can be used in basic segmentation rather than splitting out customers by explicit ages.

How we unify customer records

Customer ID

This field is typically used to match to your other data sources, such as Transactional, and Email Engagement platforms. If this ID is used across your business, it will be the field that links across all systems.

Email address

This field is used to unify your data to Twitter, enable activation on various sales channels, and can be used to unify your data to certain second and third party sources.

Phone number

This field is used to unify on other data sets, such as Experian. Lexer transforms your mobile numbers to make sure they’re in a consistent format, ensuring the highest possible unification rates.

Limitations

The volume of data being sent from each platform’s respective API will affect the time it takes to extract it. If we're trying to extract a large amount of data, it’s worth noting this could take days and has the potential to fail. This is based on each platform’s ability to send across the data Lexer is asking for, within a reasonable time, and without becoming overwhelmed.

And that's it! Now that you know how we process your CRM data and which attributes we can build with it.