Why Relationships are Essential for B2C Data — and How Tamr Helps

In the world of B2C data, it’s not enough to know who your customers are. You also need to understand how they’re connected to each other.

Whether it’s a parent ordering products for a child, multiple individuals belonging to the same household, or a consumer who uses different email addresses across purchases, these relationships tell a story. This story – when understood – can significantly improve marketing, personalization, fraud detection, and the overall customer experience.

The reality is that B2C data is messy. People change names, move houses, open new accounts, and interact with your brand through a multitude of channels. Many B2C companies use traditional master data management (MDM) systems to manage their ever-evolving customer data. But as the volume and complexity of this data grows and grows, traditional MDM solutions struggle to keep up.

Tamr’s AI-native MDM solution tackles B2C data challenges differently by taking an approach to entity resolution that goes beyond the individual record. Using its relationships interface and API, Tamr enables organizations to model and query the connections between people, accounts, devices, and more. Whether you're associating “John Smith” with multiple emails or linking household members to a single address, Tamr’s API and the UI itself provide the flexibility and power that companies need to gain greater insight into how to best use and understand their customer data.

Why does this matter? Because in B2C, context is everything. The relationship between records can surface intent, expose risk, or unlock entirely new segments for outreach.

Getting Technical: Using the Tamr Relationships API

Tamr’s Relationships API (/relationships) provides a flexible and scalable way to define and query connections between entities — like customers, accounts, addresses, or devices — regardless of how they’re represented in source data. Here’s how it works.

At its core, a relationship in Tamr is an edge between two records (entities), stored in a relationship dataset. Each edge includes:

• Source ID and Target ID: identifiers of the related records
• Type: a user-defined label describing the relationship (e.g., same_household, same_person, parent_of)
• Confidence: an optional score indicating the likelihood or strength of the relationship
• Attributes: additional metadata that might describe how or why the records are connected

You can ingest, query, and manage relationships via the API, making it easy to integrate with downstream systems or use in analytics pipelines.

These relationships can then be surfaced in Tamr’s mastered data, exported to downstream systems, or visualized in Customer 360 dashboards. Over time, as new relationships are inferred or manually curated, your understanding of the customer universe deepens, without hardcoding rigid hierarchies.

Why Relationships Matter More Than Ever

In the age of personalization, data without context is just noise. By capturing and leveraging relationships between customers, accounts, and interactions, businesses can shift from reactive to intelligently proactive, understanding not just who the customer is, but how they connect to the broader network. This is particularly valuable if an organization takes advantage of the complementary benefits of a customer data platform (CDP) for downstream, personalized marketing outreach and activation. Identities are important, but relationships are what bring B2C data to life and open up revenue-generating (and risk-mitigating) opportunities. And Tamr helps you surface them intelligently, scalably, and securely.

Tamr’s Relationships API gives organizations the tools to uncover connections at scale, enriching customer data with meaning and enabling smarter decisions across marketing, customer service, and risk. Start building smarter customer experiences, one relationship at a time. Explore the Tamr Relationships API and schedule a call with us to see how easy it is to add this layer of insight to your B2C data strategy.