Capability: Managed Marketing Services

HOW IDENTITY RESOLUTION ENABLES ADVANCED PERSONALISATION IN BIG DATA ENVIRONMENTS

Most organisations have plenty of data. The issue is not how much you have, it’s what you can do with it. You may be sitting on a goldmine of data insight, but you can’t use it to refine personalised communications and marketing unless you can connect it with the digital platforms and tools that will deliver the personalisation.

Tackling this challenge is key to success in a world where consumers are increasingly intolerant of content and approaches that aren’t directly relevant to them. You need to use all the information you have to create unified identities that can inform personalised customer experiences, if you want to compete effectively.

The problem becomes more acute if you are using a data lake as the primary store of customer data. The concept and architecture of data lakes do not lend themselves to the enforced structure, maintenance and standardised logging that good identity resolution requires. At the opposite end of the spectrum, more traditional data warehouses can lack the structure or ability to capture and use large quantities of digital data which can form the backbone of modern identity resolution. These platforms may also be difficult to integrate with other MarTech and AdTech.

TACKLING IDENTITY RESOLUTION IN DATA LAKES

If you work in a big data environment, you may struggle to identify unique customers. It can be risky to rely on insights developed from data lakes, because they have no enforced structure at the point of data capture. This makes it challenging to define a customer view in a consistent manner, with all data points incorporated.

CACI’s identity resolution application ResolvID has a smart way of tackling this problem. It takes in all potentially identifiable information as it’s loaded into the data lake and continues to iterate and develop the customer picture over time. It adds up small quantities of data from sources including transactions, ClickStream data and geolocation to build the identity of a customer. The structure of the customer is defined within the platform: ResolvId makes its keys available for use within any and all resources.

TACKLING IDENTITY RESOLUTION IN DATA WAREHOUSES

If your organisation uses enterprise or operational data warehouses, it can be difficult to connect the finance, CRM and order data held within them directly with digital customer data platforms (CDPs) that serve web, automated marketing and mobile app content.

CDPs maintain digital identifiers, but they need a single customer identifier to truly connect the business with digital channels. Because of the complex nature of data held in the data warehouse, it can be challenging to resolve to an individual’s identity.

Using ResolvID as a middle layer, you can create a unified identity and identity graph that can work in both environments. It connects the systems to enable rapid deployment, unlocking value in your data for personalised campaigns. You’ll achieve a single view of the customer and can report crucial unified measures such as lifetime value.

Read the previous blog to find out factors to consider in delivering personalised content and marketing that fuel sales and retention in competitive consumer markets. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss identity resolution in your big data environment with one of our campaign data experts.

Your customers and prospects want and expect you to communicate with them as individuals. It’s a very natural human desire – no-one wants to feel like they’re just a data point.

Today’s sophisticated data management and campaign delivery technology makes this possible in theory. But effective personalised communication has become more complex in recent times because of the challenges of identity resolution.

Identity resolution has always been important. It means matching identities across different touchpoints to create a unified profile for every customer. The advent of GDPR intensified the need to use identity resolution to manage data preferences robustly across channels and media, to comply with data protection laws.

But legal compliance is only one reason for the extreme complexity of the identity resolution challenge today. For marketing personalisation and for analytics, you need an accurate view of an individual, so you can always communicate with them in context of who they are and what matters to them.

We need to be able to resolve identities better, faster and more efficiently across a much greater amount of data to keep pace with competitive pressures and market demands.

CONSUMERS ARE UNFORGIVING

Your customers are ever more demanding – they want and expect to know about the right products and services at the right time and to be served content that’s relevant to their current preferences. 63% of customers say they will stop using companies who deliver poor individual marketing, according to data cited by the Forbes CMO network.

DIGITAL BEHAVIOUR IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING

There’s an ever-growing number of channels enabling consumer engagement with brands. Consumers also have more devices. They use them to graze across a range of channels and media – frequently their interactions are superficial and transient. They no longer adopt a consistent pattern of behaviour, nor do they always log in or identify themselves directly when they view content.

YOU CAN’T RELY ON THIRD PARTY COOKIES

The third-party cookie is on its way out. That makes it harder to connect interactions through online advertising on third party sites. First party data is becoming more important, and it must be accurately resolved with other sources.

SOPHISTICATED TECH CAN OVERREACH YOUR CAPABILITIES

Technology is at hand to help and many vendors are pushing their solutions. These are based on complex data science and may include visualisations, digital reporting platforms and next best action platforms. Many are excellent tools, but you need to bring your data together in a consistent, de-duplicated way before you can obtain value from them.

THERE ARE SHADES OF GREY IN DIGITAL IDENTITIES

In the previous digital era, identity resolution was relatively simple – you either knew or did not know who a person was. But it’s no longer black and white. You can also personalise and understand preferences without knowing exactly who the individual is, learning about them through behaviour and touchpoints.

These factors all create obstacles to delivering the personalised content and marketing that fuel sales and retention in competitive consumer markets.

Organisations need to upweight their data science and marketing analytics expertise to deal with the ever-evolving challenges of identity resolution and get the best value and differentiation from their digital marketing campaign tools and tech.

Increasingly, clients are asking CACI to step in as an expert third party resource to tackle these challenges, using the purpose-build ResolvID solution.

CACI is a frontrunner in identity resolution and has pioneered innovative ways to consolidate customer data since the issue first arose. We started with matching services based on name, surname, address. Today, we have built far beyond that expertise to create ResolvID, a real time API-driven product that learns as it resolves a wide range of different data sets. It can also address digital applications where there may be no first party identifiers, instead using IP addresses and device IDs.

Our next blog will be to find out exactly how identity resolution supports advanced personalisation, compliance and accurate analytics, and why this is crucial for your success in today’s digital marketplace. Or get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we can help you tackle the challenges of identity resolution in your customer data.