Anyone who works with customer records in scholarly publishing will know that a complicating factor can be the hierarchical relationships between individuals, departments, institutions and consortia. For a long time now it has been possible to use MasterVision to search and analyse the hierarchical relationships between customer records. We are pleased to say this has now become even easier!
As we know, most institutions sit within a complex network of relationships. A search in MasterVision for the University of Oxford can be extended to include parent entities higher up the family tree (such as consortia) or subsidiary organisations (such as departments, libraries or faculties). You can also search for institutional customers and then switch to find those individual people who have a relationship with those institutions.
MasterVision’s newly enhanced ‘Find related…’ functionality allows for an easy and powerful way to search these relationships.
For example, if we were to run a search for a set of institutions, we can now follow the “Include related institutions” link to a clearly illustrated set of options (below) which allows us to define the hierarchical relationships we wish to apply to our search results and therefore include in a new search.
We can also use our set of institutional search results to find related individuals. Again, we can choose to find those who have a direct relationship with our institutions, or specify whether we would like to include those that may be connected to them at other levels in the hierarchy.
This can also be turned around so that starting from a search for individuals, we can find related institutions including parent or subsidiary organisations.
Being able to quickly and easily analyse the relationships in customer data is vital when doing market share analysis; working out who should be considered ‘sold to’, when going after new subscriptions; or relating activities, such as article submissions, back to a given institution.
We think that this is a very simple and easy to understand way to carry out very complex hierarchical searches. If you are a MasterVision client who wants to know more about this new functionality contact your account manager. If you aren’t yet a MasterVision client and would like to be able to analyse your customer relationships this easily, simply contact us for a demo.
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