Use Cases for Best-in-Class First-Party Identity Resolution |

In the first two parts of Redpoint’s webinar series on identity resolution, we examined the various types and explored why it is a core component of any customer data platform (CDP) for building an accurate golden record.

In the third installment of the four-part series (Thursday, Aug. 25, noon EDT) Redpoint will take a deeper dive on identity resolution use cases. Our hosts Beth Scagnoli and Steve Zisk will discuss why organizations across many different verticals, particularly with the deprecation of the third-party cookie, are turning to identity resolution to find, cleanse, match, merge and relate all the disparate signals about a customer to produce an accurate, complete and up-to-date view of the customer that provides the customer data foundation for a relevant, personalized customer experience.

Identity resolution is sometimes used interchangeably with golden record (or a unified customer profile) but the creation of a golden record is actually a use case – an important one – of identity resolution. That is, a golden record is incomplete without identity resolution, but there are components of a golden record that do not involve identity resolution steps. Data aggregates such as the last email address a customer used, how many times they’ve visited the website, purchase history over the last year, etc., are not present or required for identity resolution.

A golden record may also include predictions or propensities related to the customer journey as well as additional information from external sources. Accurate identity resolution is critical for providing the cleansed and matched records needed for data enrichment, providing a 360° view of an individual, household or entity leveraging online and offfline data, as well as third-party data (National Change of Address, etc.) and other demographic overlays. In the hospitality industry, for example, creating a golden record that combined all this information along with core data aggregates is used to understand guest preferences across multiple properties within a given portfolio.

Identity Resolution by Industry

Modeling customer behaviors and lifestyles is another identity resolution use case. Retailers, for example, use identity resolution to better understand the journey of a given customer from college to young adult to parent. Similarly, in financial services, identity resolution helps form an understanding of the purchase patterns or cycles for a given customer – key to detecting opportunities for growth in customer value as well as anomalies for fraud detection.

Developing a communication strategy is a third identity resolution use case. In healthcare, for instance, identity resolution is vital for engaging patients with hyper-relevant conversations about prescriptions, care plans, telehealth options and other topics of interest to a healthcare consumer – online or offline. But healthcare use cases may require different standards and controls for identity resolution due to HIPAA requirements.

In many industries, understanding the dynamics of a household helps form a communication strategy as the household members shift. And households, extended relationships, business contacts and organizations all need their own rules and relationships for consistent identity resolution.

Beyond use cases, next week’s webinar will touch on other important identity resolution topics, such as how organizations should balance collecting customer data for personalization while thinking about customer expectations for privacy and transparency.

The webinar will also explore how to tune identity resolution functions to handle your organization’s specific use cases, developing strategies for situations such as anomaly/error threshold and data stewardship, as well as match testing/validation. Depending on the industry, there are variable tolerances for items such as sources of error from human data entry. In healthcare, for example, there is a much tighter threshold (exact match only) that guide communications for situations such as prescription refills, diagnosis explanations, etc., whereas those thresholds are significantly loosened for more generic marketing use cases.

Join us on Thursday, Aug. 25 at noon EDT as Redpoint Vice President of Product Management Beth Scagnoli and Senior Product Marketing Manager Steve Zisk kick off the third installment of Redpoint’s identity resolution webinar series. Part 4 of the series, “Best Practices to Create Golden Records” will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 11 a.m. EDT.