Identity resolution is critical in identifying and linking various customer identifiers across multiple platforms and devices. In today's digital landscape, customers engage with brands through numerous channels, making achieving a unified customer 360, essential. This unified view is crucial for delivering seamless experiences, improving targeting and personalization, enhancing analytics, and ensuring compliance with data privacy laws.
Do You Have an Identity Resolution Problem?
Here are some tell-tale signs indicating that your organization might be facing an identity resolution issue:
1. Inconsistent Customer Profiles
- Fragmented Data: If customer data is scattered across various systems without a unified view, it clearly indicates an identity resolution issue.
- Duplicate Records: Finding multiple profiles for the same customer indicates problems in linking data points.
2. Poor Marketing Performance
- Low Conversion Rates: Difficulty in targeting or retargeting leads to ineffective marketing and low conversion rates.
- High Bounce Rates: Customers are more likely to disengage if they do not receive relevant content.
3. Difficulty in Personalization
- Inconsistent Experiences Across Channels: Struggling to provide a seamless, personalized customer experience across all touchpoints is a classic symptom.
- Generic Communications: If your communications do not resonate with your customers' individual interests and behaviors, it might be due to poor identity resolution.
4. Data Compliance Issues
- Privacy Concerns: Managing consent across different identifiers can lead to privacy compliance issues.
- Regulatory Challenges: The inability to accurately identify customers can result in breaches of data protection regulations.
5. Analytics and Reporting Challenges
- Inaccurate Metrics: Discrepancies in metrics and KPIs due to fragmented customer views.
- Insights Gaps: Struggles in deriving actionable insights from your data because of incomplete or inaccurate customer profiles.
If you're experiencing one or more of these signs, it's likely time to think about implementing a new or better identity resolution strategy. Addressing these issues can significantly enhance your marketing efforts, improve customer experiences, and ensure compliance with data protection laws.
the Ideal Identity Resolution Outcome
"Fashion Forward," a hypothetical global retailer, faced challenges with disconnected customer data between their online platforms and physical stores, leading to inconsistent experiences. By adopting advanced identity resolution technology, they could track and unify customer interactions across all channels. A standout example is Sarah, a loyal in-store shopper who ventured online during a holiday sale. With the new system, Fashion Forward linked her in-store and online behaviors, offering personalized recommendations that led to her making her largest purchase yet. When she returned an item in-store, the staff, having access to her unified profile, suggested suitable alternatives, enhancing her shopping experience. This strategic shift improved customer experiences and significantly increased loyalty and sales, demonstrating the crucial role of identity resolution in modern retail.
Implementing Identity Resolution
Implementing identity resolution in your organization requires a strategic approach. The first step in identity resolution is creating an identity graph. An Identity Graph is a table that logs all identifiers for a customer, providing a map of how you can stitch together customer interactions. The graph collects these identifiers and links them to customer profiles, which are used to target and personalize marketing messages. The identity graph is the foundation of identity resolution. It serves as a comprehensive map, linking all customer identifiers (e.g., email addresses, social media profiles, device IDs) to single customer profiles.
Step 1: Build an Identity Graph
Sub-steps:
- Collect Identifiers: Gather all possible customer identifiers from various data sources.
- Create Customer Profiles: Initialize empty profiles for individual customers.
- Map Identifiers to Profiles: Assign each identifier to the correct customer profile.
Step 2: Consolidate Customer Data
Once the identity graph is created, the next step is consolidating and deduplicating customer data. This step is crucial for achieving a unified customer view.
Sub-steps:
- Link Data Points: The identity graph links different actions and data points to the correct customer profile.
- Deduplicate: Identify and merge duplicate records within the identity graph.
Step 3: Link Entities to Customer Data
Linking other relevant entities (e.g., transactions, interactions) to customer profiles is essential for building a 360-degree view.
Sub-steps:
- Identify Relevant Entities: Determine which types of data (transactions, interactions, etc.) need to be linked to customer profiles.
- Link Entities to Profiles: Use the consolidated profiles to link these entities accordingly.
Implementing Identity resolution is a lot more complex than this, but these are these high-level steps you need to follow.
Deterministic vs Probabilistic Identity Resolution
Deterministic Identity Resolution relies on exact matches of first-party data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, or social security numbers, to link engagement or interactions directly to specific user profiles. This method banks on the availability of personally identifiable information (PII) that unequivocally ties a piece of data to an individual.
Advantages:
- High Accuracy: Since it's based on unique identifiers, this approach ensures a high level of confidence in the data match.
- Privacy Compliance: It's easier to comply with privacy regulations because it relies on data that users have consented to share.
- Personalization: Enables highly personalized marketing or communication strategies by accurately identifying individuals.
Limitations:
- Data Silos: Its effectiveness is limited by the availability and accuracy of PII data.
- Scalability Issues: May not be as scalable for broader audience insights due to reliance on exact data matches.
Example Scenario:
A retail brand sends a personalized email to a customer who recently purchased a product online. By using the customer's email address (a PII), the brand can link the purchase to the customer's profile and send a tailored email recommending related products. This scenario exemplifies the high accuracy and personalization capability of deterministic methods.
Probabilistic Identity Resolution
Probabilistic Identity Resolution employs algorithms and statistical models to infer connections between disparate pieces of data without relying on exact PII matches. It looks at patterns, behaviors, and the likelihood of data points belonging to the same user based on non-PII information, such as IP addresses, device types, and browsing behaviors.
Advantages:
- Broader Reach: Can identify and connect user interactions across channels even when PII is not available, leading to a larger potential audience.
- Flexibility: Offers the ability to make connections in data-limited environments, providing insights into user behavior that might not be accessible through deterministic methods.
Limitations:
- Lower Accuracy: The inferential nature of this method means there's a higher chance of incorrect matches compared to deterministic methods.
- Privacy Concerns: May raise privacy and data protection concerns due to the use of inferred data points to identify individuals.
Example Scenario:
An online news portal wants to understand how its readers interact with content across devices without necessarily logging in. By using probabilistic identity resolution, the portal can analyze patterns such as device types, IP addresses, and browsing times to infer that multiple sessions belong to the same reader. This approach enables the portal to optimize content and layout for better user engagement, despite the lack of direct PII linkage.
When One is Better Than the Other
Deterministic identity resolution is more suitable in scenarios requiring high accuracy and personalization, particularly when dealing with sensitive or regulated data. For instance, in healthcare or financial services, where accurately identifying individuals is crucial for delivering services and complying with regulations.
Probabilistic identity resolution, on the other hand, is better suited for scenarios where the goal is to understand broader patterns and behaviors across a user base, especially when PII is sparse or unavailable. This approach is valuable for market research, audience segmentation, and targeted advertising in environments where individualized personalization is less critical than reaching a broader audience with generalized insights.
In conclusion, the choice between deterministic and probabilistic identity resolution depends on the specific needs of the project, including the required level of accuracy, available data, and privacy considerations.
Identity Resolution and Data Quality: The Importance of a Cloud Data Warehouse
The Central Role of a Cloud Data Warehouse
In the realm of data management, the quality and integrity of your data are as crucial as the volume of data you possess. This is particularly true for identity resolution.
Let's illustrate the importance of high-quality data with a story. Imagine a company, let's call it "Tech Innovate," embarking on an ambitious marketing campaign. They decided to segment their customers based on their purchasing behavior and preferences. Unfortunately, Tech Innovate relied on disparate data sources without consolidating them into a cloud data warehouse first. The result? A classic case of bad data quality undermining their efforts.
For identity resolution, Tech Innovate's strategy was to match customer records across multiple platforms. However, due to inconsistencies and errors in their data, many customers were either duplicated across segments or missed entirely. One glaring instance involved sending promotional emails for a vegetarian product line to customers who had exclusively purchased meat-based products. This mistake not only wasted resources but also frustrated their customer base, leading to decreased trust and brand loyalty.
Scope of Identifiers in Identity Resolution
Identifiers are the data used to identify customers. The most common identifiers are email addresses, login data, and IP addresses. To fill in the gaps, you need to utilize externalIDs, identifiers pulled into your data warehouse from an external data source.
Personalized Shopping Experience in E-commerce and Retail
Imagine HypnoFashion, an online clothing retailer, leveraging identity resolution to enhance their customer experience. By integrating data from various touchpoints—such as website visits, mobile app usage, and in-store interactions—HypnoFashion creates a unified customer profile. This comprehensive insight allows them to offer highly personalized product recommendations. For instance, a customer who frequently browses for eco-friendly products would receive suggestions for sustainable clothing lines, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Omnichannel Marketing for a Travel Company
Next, consider Wanderlust Adventures, a travel agency aiming to provide seamless experiences across channels. Using identity resolution, Wanderlust Adventures can track a customer's journey from social media ads to newsletter sign-up and website browsing. This unified view enables them to deliver tailored holiday packages via the customer's preferred communication channel, whether it be email, social media, or SMS. As a result, the customer receives personalized travel suggestions that resonate with their interests, significantly boosting conversion rates.
Enhanced Lead Generation for a SaaS Company
Lastly, envision CloudTech Solutions, a SaaS company specializing in project management software. By implementing identity resolution, CloudTech can accurately track potential business clients across digital touchpoints—LinkedIn interactions, website visits, and webinar attendances. This comprehensive data allows them to segment leads based on interest level and engagement, enabling targeted outreach efforts. For example, a business frequently visiting their pricing page might receive a custom proposal or a direct call from sales, streamlining the lead conversion process.
Identity Resolution for Offline and Online Conversion Tracking
Identity resolution plays a crucial role in offline and online conversion tracking. By linking online and offline customer data, businesses can get a more comprehensive view of customer behavior and effectively track conversions across all touchpoints.
For instance, a customer might research a product online and then purchase in a physical store. Without identity resolution, these two actions would be treated as separate events, resulting in incomplete and inaccurate conversion data.
By linking the online and offline data, businesses can get a complete picture of the customer journey, enabling them to track conversions and optimize their marketing strategies accurately.
What about Entity resolution?
Entity resolution is a similar but different concept. we wrote extensively on the differences between Identity resolution and Entity Resolution in this guide
Conclusion
Identity Resolution is essential for businesses to create a comprehensive and unified view of their customers. It solves the challenges of fragmented customer data and the growing focus on data privacy. By implementing an effective identity resolution strategy, businesses can improve the quality of their data, enhance their marketing efforts, and deliver personalized customer experiences.
However, Identity Resolution is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business has unique needs and challenges, and the implementation of identity resolution should be tailored to meet these needs. Whether through deterministic or probabilistic methods, the key is to find a balance that provides the most accurate and comprehensive view of the customer.
As Identity Resolution evolves with technology and regulatory changes, businesses must stay ahead of the curve to leverage its benefits fully. By investing in a robust identity resolution solution, businesses can stay competitive and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Given the complexities of implementing identity resolution effectively, engaging with experts can provide valuable insights and guidance. This is where our team at Census can assist. We can help you implement identity resolution at your company. Book a Demo with us Today This will allow you to ask questions specific to your business needs and see firsthand how our platform can support your objectives.