Identity Resolution – The Key to Knowing Your Customers in the Digital Age

by Barton Goldenberg

Today, customers have almost limitless ways engage brands, using all kinds of devices across hundreds of touch points. This is the new normal, and the amount and complexity of digital information will only grow in the future. At the same time, potentially-available customer data already exceeds the ability of most organizations to harvest and process it. The good news is that new technology exists, in a field called Identity Resolution, to help connect the dots.

Forrester describes Identity Resolution as:

“…a key enabler for contextual marketing that connects multiple sources of identity and customer information to support robust targeting, personalization, and addressability across multiple touchpoints and devices. Complete identity resolution marries multiple sources of identifier and interaction information to form a cross-channel view of the consumer.”

Online and Off-line Customer Data

Nowadays, customer data comes from two broad sources – online and off-line.  Activities like store visits, service calls, contact-center interactions, etc., are non-digital and take place off-line. These engagements nonetheless can provide important insights that must part of any comprehensive customer profile. Digital (online) data from website visits, eCommerce transactions and Social Media engagements also must be captured, organized and stored. Some of this data will be anonymous. Identity Resolution tools not only help integrate off-line and on-line customer data but also match both anonymous and identifiable data to individual customer records.

The ability to accurately identify customers is essential for all marketing activities. Never have the rewards for getting this right been greater, or the risks for falling short of the competition been more severe. The winners over the next decade will be the companies that commit today to developing capabilities to both harvest and analyze data and serve customers across all possible channels of engagement.

At ISM, we help our clients gather digital and non-digital customer information, analyze it, derive actionable insights from it and deploy digital tools to customize & optimize each individual customer’s experience.  Learn more about ISM’s Emerging Technology services or e-mail us at sales@ismguide.com.

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Barton Goldenberg speaks about changes and trends in the ways organizations engage with today’s connected consumer. His real-world examples and humorous style have distinguished him at events including the Gartner 360 Customer Summit, Dreamforce, CRM Evolution and others.

Barton is founder and President of ISM Inc., where clients include Chase Bank, ExxonMobil, Jaguar Land Rover, Johnson Controls, Kraft Heinz, Marriott, Nike, Schlumberger, T. Rowe Price, U.S. Department of Defense, Zumba Fitness and many more.

An acclaimed author, keynote speaker, and member of the CRM Hall of Fame, Barton holds a B.Sc. (Economics) degree with honors from the Wharton School of Business and a M.Sc. (Economics) degree from the London School of Economics.on, always-connected’ consumer.