Every modern business wants it, but few achieve it seamlessly: the true 360-degree customer view. It’s the holy grail of customer intelligence—a unified, real-time profile that combines every interaction, transaction, and data point into a single, actionable record.
The challenge isn't a lack of data. It's that the data is scattered across a dozen different systems: your CRM holds sales conversations, your billing platform tracks subscriptions, your support desk has service tickets, and your marketing tool logs campaign engagement. Stitching this together is often a messy, expensive, and fragile process involving complex ETL pipelines and data warehouses that are perpetually out of sync.
What if you could bypass this complexity? What if, instead of syncing disparate databases, you could model your entire business world—customers, orders, tickets, and all—as interconnected objects through a single API?
This is the promise of "Entities as Code," and with Nouns.do, it’s not just a promise; it’s a practical reality. Let's walk through how to build a powerful 360-degree customer view using universal objects.
Before we build the solution, let's diagnose the pain. A fragmented view of the customer leads to missed opportunities and poor experiences:
These aren't isolated failures; they are symptoms of a system that lacks a central nervous system. Traditional databases store data, but they don't inherently understand the relationships between a Customer, an Order, and a SupportTicket.
Nouns.do operates on a simple but powerful premise: Your business is made up of "nouns"—people, places, things, and ideas. We call these entities. Instead of wrestling with database schemas and foreign keys, you define these entities and their relationships through a clean, developer-friendly API.
An entity isn't just a row in a table; it's a universal object that encapsulates properties and connects to other entities. Let's build our Customer 360 view step-by-step.
Everything starts with the customer. In Nouns.do, we can define a Customer entity with the properties that matter most to our business. This becomes our central object.
{
"id": "cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"object": "entity",
"type": "Customer",
"properties": {
"name": "Jane Doe",
"email": "jane.doe@example.com",
"status": "active",
"segment": "enterprise",
"lifetimeValue": 55400,
"createdAt": "2023-10-27T10:00:00Z"
},
"relationships": {
"orders": "/v1/entities?type=Order&customerId=cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"subscription": "/v1/entities/sub_1122334455",
"tickets": "/v1/entities?type=SupportTicket&requesterId=cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"account": "/v1/entities/acct_8h7g6f5e4d3c2b1a"
}
}
Look closely at the relationships block. This is where the magic happens. We're not just storing data; we are creating living links to every other entity related to this customer. These aren't just IDs; they are API endpoints that can be instantly queried to retrieve the related objects.
Next, we define the other nouns in our customer's world. Let's create an Order entity.
{
"id": "ord_9z8y7x6w5v4u3t2s",
"object": "entity",
"type": "Order",
"properties": {
"amount": 2500,
"currency": "usd",
"status": "completed",
"productSku": "PRO-TIER-YR",
"createdAt": "2024-05-15T14:30:00Z"
},
"relationships": {
"customer": "/v1/entities/cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h"
}
}
By adding a relationship back to the customer (cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h), we've established a clear, bi-directional link. We now have a full history of every purchase connected directly to the customer object. The same logic applies to Subscription entities, Invoice entities, or any other "thing" a customer owns.
A customer's history isn't just about what they buy; it's about their experience. Let’s model a SupportTicket.
{
"id": "tkt_a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8",
"object": "entity",
"type": "SupportTicket",
"properties": {
"subject": "API latency issues",
"status": "open",
"priority": "high",
"submittedAt": "2024-06-20T09:15:00Z"
},
"relationships": {
"requester": "/v1/entities/cus_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h"
}
}
Now, the picture is becoming clearer. By linking tickets to customers, anyone in your organization can instantly see if a customer is having issues before they reach out.
With these three simple entity types defined, you've unlocked a level of insight that previously required a data engineering team.
Because every entity and relationship is exposed via the API, you can ask complex business questions with simple queries:
This enables:
Not at all. While Nouns.do stores data, it operates at a higher level of abstraction. It's a business-aware layer that understands your world.
The 360-degree customer view is no longer an insurmountable challenge. By embracing the "Entities as Code" paradigm, you can move from fragmented data silos to a unified, intelligent system. Nouns.do provides the universal entity management API to make it happen.
Ready to stop syncing and start modeling? Explore Nouns.do and define your first universal object in minutes.