Modern customer systems generally have access to complete person details, to large amounts of data storage and to application environments which accept variable size fields.

There is no reason why these systems should ever discard or truncate data as they did in the past.

One major responsibility of these systems is therefore to capture as much data about the person as possible within the boundaries of privacy laws and good customer relations.

A customer take-on application also has the responsibility of verifying the integrity of the person’s details. This involves all kinds of edit checking, and at least a check to see if the person is already known to the customer system.

It may also be in the organization’s interest to check other data sources for such information as:

The most reliable piece of information to use to perform such searches is the person’s name. It is generally the most stable, and can sustain the most variation without losing its essential identity.

The type of name search performed on each data should be allowed to differ due to the varying risk associated with missing a match. Using the other identifying person data, such as birth date and address for confirmation (but not in search keys) these searches should be able to return a short list of highly likely candidate matches.