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Thought Leadership

Identity Resolution: From Disparate Data to Customer Connections

Google got it spot on when it compared modern customer journeys to the plot of a complicated “whodunit”. Today, shopping for a product or service is rarely a spontaneous, one-stop experience. It’s a journey of interwoven interactions carried out across multiple touchpoints and channels, some offline and many online.  For marketers, the result is an ever-growing mass of disparate customer data sets that need to be unified, understood, and made actionable. Thankfully, identity resolution is here to help.

There’s a wealth of customer data for brands to tap into, from consented, zero-party insights to crumbling third-party cookies. For brands, the pressure is on to transform these “identifiers” into meaningful, omnichannel experiences. With a rock-solid identity resolution strategy, organizations can sift through the rubble to find gold – intelligent insights that inform valuable customer experiences.

 

Getting Personal with Identity Resolution

Identity resolution refers to the process of connecting fragmented customer data sets from across every channel and touchpoint, both digital and offline. By unifying structured and unstructured “breadcrumbs” from all available sources, and attributing every interaction to the correct user profile, identity resolution enables organizations to understand their customers clearly.

But why exactly is identity resolution so important in the customer experience space? Put simply, because it equips marketers with a vital ingredient for relevant engagements: a holistic, optimized, and real-time view of every prospect and customer. Customer data resolution makes sense of the nonsensical by turning digital footprints into individualized insights.

For brands, having access to an evolving view of every customer unlocks a barrel of opportunities. At even the most basic level, it allows marketers to provide a consistent customer experience across digital and offline channels. At a more advanced level, it enables them to predict and deliver the next best experience for customers based on device preferences, buying behaviors, context, and a whole host of other metrics.

Customers don’t even need to engage regularly for identity resolution to hold power. For instance, despite finding that 34% of insurance customers only communicate with their policy provider when making a claim, we help insurance companies drive value consistently with the Intelligent Engagement Platform. By leveraging its advanced Customer DNA™ feature, insurance companies can go from policy providers to lifelong advisors.

Without identity resolution, organizations are left with a far less dynamic approach to understanding their customers: segmentation. Sure, segmentation has its benefits. When you’re searching for new audiences, for instance, you might use segmentation to develop your earliest understanding of new prospects’ preferences and behaviors. But grouping your customers according to shared values or characteristics can only take you so far.

As customers, we often receive impersonal messages from brands with “spray and pray” strategies – and it’s frustrating. Nobody wants an inbox full of emails promoting a new credit card that’s already sitting in your wallet, or a discount code for a brand that hasn‘t yet dealt with your latest complaint. What we really want are individualized engagements that consider our needs in that exact moment and context. For organizations, the key to unlocking this high-value experience is identity resolution.

Identity Resolution

Resolving Poor Customer Data Resolution

If you can identify and integrate data sets effectively, it doesn’t matter when, where, or how individuals engage with your brand. You’ll still be able to learn from these insights to deliver a contextually relevant journey for every customer at every moment.

Sound like a bold statement? For some brands, it might just be. Successful identity resolution is still a pipe dream for many, with more than 70% of marketers struggling to retain an accurate and optimized customer ID. Multiple factors can contribute to this, including poor-quality data and increasingly restrictive data protection regulations, including the deprecation of third-party cookies.

What brands need is an infrastructure that allows them to unify customer data at scale, all while complying with the most up-to-date data privacy regulations. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are often touted as a marketer’s best friend here, but it’s time to look beyond the capabilities of a standard CDP. It’s not just having a 360-degree view of your customers that counts, but being able to make insights actionable throughout their lifecycles.

Frustratingly, poor data accessibility is clearly still a prominent issue for many organizations. In fact, a 2022 report from the CMO Council found that the “real-time availability of insights” is currently beyond reach for 42% of marketers. To make insights actionable, overcoming poor data accessibility needs to be at the forefront of brands’ digital investment choices. Organizations can put this into practice by finding a CDP that offers identity resolution alongside real-time decision-making, as it’s this combination that makes it possible to engage with customers meaningfully.

Intelligent Engagement Platform - IEP

The Intelligent Engagement Platform: Where Identity Resolution Goes Further

With AI-powered customer analytics and real-time interaction management (RTIM) at its core, the Intelligent Engagement Platform is uniquely placed to transform unified customer data into valuable connections. It goes further than most customer data resolution platforms by communicating directly with the execution channels in a MarTech stack, and driving experiences that are considered, consistent, and cross-channel.

Get in touch to find out how the Intelligent Engagement Platform could elevate your identity resolution strategy, or schedule a product tour to see our Customer DNA™ feature in action.

To learn more about unlocking the potential of customer data with the right infrastructure, check out our two-part handbook, Creating a Well-oiled MarTech Stack: From a Static Stack to a Holistic MarTech Ecosystem. You can download Volume 1 here – and keep your eyes peeled for Volume 2!