More and more businesses online are realizing that to remain competitive, the one thing that will keep them ahead of the pack is a complete understanding of their customers. A customer's identity resolution is akin to the Holy Grail for any business, especially in today's competitive landscape.
What is Identity Resolution?
A single unified customer profile is of paramount interest to businesses today. Identity resolution is the way of attributing customer interactions with your business across all touchpoints.
Additionally, let's not forget that in the last few years, the number of touchpoints customers can have with your business has increased significantly.
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How Does Identity Resolution Work?
In a recent report, Forrester has described identity resolution as "The process of integrating identifiers across available touchpoints and devices with behavior, transaction, and contextual information into a cohesive and addressable consumer profile for marketing analysis, orchestration, and delivery."
So far, website cookies alone would suffice in this context, but consumers are no longer shopping exclusively on their desktops.
In fact, more and more of them are now taking to buying from their mobile computing devices. That, and new data privacy laws, have made the browser cookie passe.
What is "in" now instead is cross-device Identity resolution tracking. This process involves collecting and combining data related to a single customer in a way that links all their devices back to them.
Why is cross-device tracking gaining importance? It is a fact that today, the average person owns multiple devices connected to the World Wide Web. E.g., laptops, smartphones, smart TVs, game consoles, etc.
Device tracking enables marketers to determine which device and channel were used when a service or product was ultimately purchased – whether it was a desktop, mobile device, or from an e-commerce site or social media channel.
With that, what has effectively happened is that the e-commerce company or retailer has also managed to create a "unified" picture of its customer. The process is known as "Identity Resolution."
It is the method in which specific, unique "identifiers" are used to "connect" all the actions of a buyer to create a single, unified, real-time customer identity.
So what are these identifiers? The location, browser used, device used, platforms, and channels are all identifiers that help link the same person, irrespective of the device or channel used.
Once a single customer's identity is "resolved", it becomes far easier for the marketer to serve up offers to them.
Because of Identity Resolution and the customer data platform (CDP), each customer can be served up a personalized and unique brand experience.
How is Identity Resolution Beneficial for Marketers?
With this concept, marketers gain a comprehensive 360-degree view of their consumers by integrating online and offline data.
All kinds of businesses, from mom-and-pop to Fortune 500 companies, are now turning to identity resolution services to help their customers better manage and protect their personal data. Why? Because this practice improves your customer's overall trustworthiness.
Of course, if you are the one offering a service, many of your customers may opt in to have you manage their personal data and handle it in accordance with industry standards.
1. All about cross-device tracking
Therefore, for the reasons stated above, marketers these days prefer to use cross-device Identity Resolution tracking to maintain a comprehensive profile of every client.
Essentially, the latter allows for the collection and linking of data in a way that all devices used by one person are tracked back to them.
The importance of cross-device tracking lies in its ability to enable business teams to understand whether a particular advertisement served on a desktop first resulted in a sale on a mobile device, both of which are owned by the same person.
But here's where things start to get a little tricky. There are two types of cross-device tracking: deterministic and probabilistic tracking, which lead to two types of identity resolution: probabilistic and deterministic.
While both methods involve complex matching across millions of data points, as well as access to all digital and device data, they can deliver one of two types of matches, depending on the technology and data sets.
2. Deterministic matching
Under deterministic matching, using a deterministic connector, such as perhaps a hashtag, email address, or username, the records of a particular customer are matched. This approach works best with first-party data.
Why first party? Because it involves the use of personally identifiable information of a customer, such as their email address, home or work address, telephone number, or credit card numbers. At the end of this exercise, there remains no doubt about the identity of the customer.
Here's an example of identity resolution: If John Doe uses his email address and logs into his email on his desktop, then uses the same email address on his Tablet, deterministic matching will show that he is the same individual.
Deterministic matching is considered more precise, as it eliminates the guesswork from the tracking process. However, here's the thing: although it is a more accurate matching method, it cannot be implemented by all businesses.
One reason for this is the type of resources it draws on and the enormous amount of data, making implementation impossible for all companies. So here's where probabilistic matching comes in.
Another factor that poses a hurdle to the implementation of deterministic matching is that it requires concrete identifiers, such as social security numbers or driver's license numbers. However, many companies do not require this information regularly. Or, even if they do, consumers may refuse to submit such sensitive information.
Randomness is not included in deterministic identity resolution models. With the same initial conditions, you will get the same result every time you run the model.
3. Probabilistic matching
This one tracks not a customer's identifiable information but relies on algorithms. This method is more "anonymous" than a deterministic one. Essentially, probabilistic matching tracks anonymous data points from different digital elements.
Some examples of the latter are device type, operating system, and browsing behavior. It uses a statistical approach to understand whether two customer records represent the same individual or not.
Probabilistic matching generates matching records that assign weight to the frequency of a data value's occurrence within a particular division.
But the obvious question is – why would you want to track anonymous data points? Isn't this a very random way of tracking, especially since you want a nearly accurate picture of your buyers?
Businesses must understand that to date, no matching system is perfect. Even for deterministic matching to work successfully, you must be 100% sure of the veracity of your data points. If values are suspect or missing, the match may not be accurate.
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Benefits of Identity Resolution
IDRes helps create a complete and accurate view of each customer. This allows businesses to deliver more personalized marketing and customer experiences.
For example, suppose you have one set of customer data in your database, another in a CRM system, and another in an email marketing tool. In that case, there is no way to know if the same person is using your website, subscribing to your emails, and calling you on the phone.
This can lead to a poor customer experience because it looks like you are not listening. Or worse, you may lose customers when you think they are still engaged with your brand.
ID resolution is also required if you want to take advantage of social network features that need customers to have an account.
Although identity resolution is relatively easy in some circumstances, it can be challenging for several reasons. The number of databases in use can be significant.
Sometimes this is because a third party generated your data source, and it only contains the current state, not a history. Or the vendor wants you to continue sending your data back to them.
You may also have multiple versions of a customer record, such as various versions of your own software. Identity resolution is not always automatic.
If a customer is not signed in to a system, the identity resolution process must undergo a series of checks to ensure that they are still the same person they were when they last visited your website or made a call.
What Benefits Can a Brand Achieve with an Identity Solution?
An identity resolution solution can provide your business with numerous valuable marketing benefits. By identifying and tracking customers across all channels, you can gain a deeper understanding of their behavior and preferences. This information can help you create more targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your customers.
In addition, the ability to identify customers across different channels can help your business reach more consumers with fewer resources.
An identity resolution solution can also help you find new customers that your sales team has not previously reached out to. This type of customer will often open their wallet much more quickly than those whom the company has already contacted.
Ultimately, an identity resolution solution can help you minimize complaints and enhance your customer service. By understanding the source of a customer's dissatisfaction, you can make adjustments to your offering that will improve their experience.
Why Does Your Brand Need Identity Resolution Platforms like a CDP?
Identity resolution platforms are crucial for brands, as they enable them to gain a deeper understanding of their customers. By identifying and resolving customer identities, brands can more accurately track customer behavior and preferences.
This enables brands to deliver a more personalized customer experience through targeted messaging, dynamic product recommendations, and tailored offers.
Additionally, by helping customers feel welcome, effective identity resolution platforms can enhance a more memorable customer experience.
Brands today can leverage the vast amounts of data collected by digital marketing platforms, social media, and mobile technologies to gain a competitive edge.
This data includes information such as social network connections, location, shopping history, travel patterns, and customer preferences.
By using these datasets to identify customers with similar characteristics, marketers can create targeted experiences for them across multiple platforms.
The ultimate vision for identity resolution platforms is to collect all this customer data and then utilize it to create a personalized, branded experience for each customer.
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"Data, Location, and People" services can provide extra value to brands today by leveraging the information that has been collected about their customers.
A customer data platform (CDP) helps you interpret customer data, enabling the creation of practical, personalized customer experiences.
CDPs like Express Analytics' Oyster can collect and unify all customer-related data across online and offline touchpoints, creating a 360-degree view of a single user.
Thus, it helps manage fragmented data across multiple channels so you can track customer behavior and deliver intelligent recommendations (in real-time).