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When you are doing any kind of data acquisition, (for example- generating a sales lead from a prospect, admitting a patient through an admission form, getting a customer to fill-up application form for your product), always try to ask for dates instead of tenure. Some examples are:
- Date of birth instead of age in years.
- Year and month of moving in current residence, instead of number of years/months in current residence.
- The year/month of joining the current job instead of number of years/months in the current job.
Sometimes a customer may not be able to remember the exact date or even the exact month related to a given event. However the same issue stays if you are asking for a tenure.
The reason is that the tenure stays as a static information which may not change with time (though some systems have a way to constantly change the tenure -for example incrementing age by 1 at year-end processing of the systems) in most of the cases. Therefore this information becomes stale as well as misleading. This problem becomes more acute with legacy/old systems. Apart from bad analysis, it may also lead to wrong customer segmentation and positioning of your product. For example, you may create new products assuming that 80% of your customers belong to "young generation", where as some of them might be older, while your system show their age, which was recorded some years back. |
