# How HockeyStack Handles Complex Account Hierarchies at Scale

There are two primary hierarchy patterns, each with different implications:

## 1. Heterogeneous Hierarchies

These organizations operate multiple brands or business units under distinct domains.

> Example: <mark style="color:blue;">Disney</mark> owns <mark style="color:blue;">ESPN.com</mark>, <mark style="color:blue;">Marvel.com</mark>, and <mark style="color:blue;">ABC.com</mark>. These are separate digital identities and journeys but are all part of the same parent company.

**Challenge**: While these domains roll up to a single customer strategically, each brand represents a distinct journey.&#x20;

**Recommendation**: We recommend visualizing each domain as its own journey - ESPN, Marvel, and ABC. This avoids forced deduplication or CRM merges, and gives your team clarity across distinct buying motions across subsidiaries.&#x20;

## 2. Homogeneous Hierarchies

These are companies with multiple business units or regional teams, and users reflect the local subsidiary they are part of.

> Example: <mark style="color:blue;">Xerox</mark> operates as <mark style="color:blue;">Xerox.com</mark>, <mark style="color:blue;">Xerox.ca</mark>, and <mark style="color:blue;">Xerox.de</mark>, and these are seen as separate journeys by default in HockeyStack.

**Challenge**: The domain does not consistently indicate the correct subsidiary a user belongs to. You could have multiple distinct teams using the same domain (<mark style="color:blue;">Xerox.com</mark>) while running entirely different subsidiaries in different countries. Sometimes, they’re all just operating under the main domain - without any subdomains - making it even harder to distinguish one business unit from another. *CRM hygiene won’t fix this, because the ambiguity isn’t in your data - it’s in how the company actually operates.*

**Recommendation**: We visualize the journey for each domain separately, with the awareness that the Ultimate Parent will contain Touchpoints for some of the subsidiaries that operate with the same domain as the ultimate parent.

## 3. Conclusion

There is no consistent pattern, even within the same organization. *The implication here is that there is no perfect algorithm or CRM process that can reliably map domains to account structure universally, no matter how much you “clean” your CRM.*

Instead of forcing a perfect CRM account hierarchy structure, we help you make intentional decisions about how to visualize customer journeys:

* Merge accounts by domain to create a clean, unified view across distinct buying motions across subsidiaries deduplicated by domain.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of how [Account Merging rules](https://docs.hockeystack.com/guides/report-examples-and-insights/merging-in-hockeystack) work in HockeyStack.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.hockeystack.com/marketing-intelligence/the-hockeystack-data-model/how-hockeystack-handles-complex-account-hierarchies-at-scale.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.