Increasing privacy restrictions and tracking mechanisms like the third-party cookie becoming obsolete are thrusting identity resolution into the spotlight as a core requirement for personalization, as well as for user-level targeting and measurement of marketing campaigns.
Because many marketing technology and service sectors offer variations on identity resolution, there is buyer and marketplace confusion about what identity resolution is, what it does, and why perfected data quality is an essential component of advanced identity resolution, needed for the creation of personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.
To more clearly define identity resolution and address confusion in the marketplace, Redpoint will host a four-part webinar series beginning July 26 and continuing through September 7 in which we address the key questions and issues. The first webinar (July 26) will focus on the meaning and types of identity resolution. The August 10 session will center on why identity resolution is a core component of any customer data platform (CDP) for building an accurate golden record. On August 25, subject matter experts will discuss various use cases for identity resolution and examine how identity resolution using first-party data honors a customer’s values for transparency, privacy, security and preferences. The closing September 7 session will focus on data quality, examining how identity resolution helps build a complete, accurate golden record.
What are Identity Resolution Use Cases?
Identity Resolution is the process of finding, cleansing, matching, merging and relating all the disparate signals (martech touchpoints, enterprise systems, databases/lakes) about a customer to produce an accurate, complete and up-to-date view of the customer. Identity Resolution is used by marketing and other business functions to analyze, deduplicate and relate customer records in order to provide consistent Customer Experience.
Privacy regulations and the end of the third-party cookie increase the need for reliable customer identities, spanning many use cases and approaches. Common use cases for resolving an identity to an individual, household or entity include:
- Eliminating audience duplication – Using a combination of deterministic (rule-based) and probabilistic (analytics-based) matching, advanced identity resolution minimizes or eliminates interacting with duplicate records and other waste.
- Better understanding of a customer (household/entity) – Identity resolution in the building of a complete, accurate golden record is key to understanding channel preferences and behaviors of customers in order to target them more effectively.
- Implementing controls – Frequency capping and suppression rules placed on a unified customer profile helps eliminate sending messages, offers or content that annoys or confuses customers.
- Extending relationships to new devices and contexts – identity resolution that brings in updated, real-time data ensures a golden record always reflects an up-to-date, complete profile of an individual/household/entity, allowing for consistent, personalized experiences across channels and devices, applied consistently and in line with customer expectations – online and offline.
Identity Resolution & Data Quality
Omnichannel personalization as an outcome of advanced identity resolution is becoming a competitive differentiator in the experience economy. Recent McKinsey research on the value of personalization found that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76 percent become frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
The value of personalization as it pertains to retention and customer loyalty underscores why data quality is a critical element of identity resolution, and why simply matching records is just the tip of the iceberg for resolving identities across all touchpoints, records, devices, channels and identifiers. Because inaccurate matching, overmatching or undermatching all result in the likelihood of introducing friction into a customer experience with irrelevant or unwanted offers or communications.
With a firm understanding of the importance of data quality, and perfecting data the moment data is ingested from multiple data sources, it becomes clear why identity resolution is a core component of a CDP. Herein lies some of the market confusion, in that many companies may think of a CDP as primarily a data aggregation system meant to automate some personalization. The reality, though, is that a CDP is really only as good as its data quality processes – and when it tackles those data quality processes – in creating a complete, accurate golden record on the back of advanced identity resolution capabilities.
The webinar series will explore each of the core issues in greater detail. To sign up for the first webinar, click here.
