Identity Resolution is a core component of any customer data platform (CDP) for building an accurate golden record. Organizations across many different verticals 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. With the disappearance of third-party cookies, accurate identity resolution becomes even more important.
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 offline 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. Other important identity resolution considerations include thinking about how to balance the collection of customer data for personalization with customer expectations for privacy and transparency.
Robust identity resolution functions handle your organization’s specific use cases, including 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.
For more on how the Redpoint CDP handles identity resolution, click here to join Redpoint VP of Product Management Beth Scagnoli and Redpoint VP of Engineering Kris Tomes in the Redpoint “CDP Back to Basics” webinar series.
