Consumers are overwhelmed with marketing noise, but what truly stands out are hyper-personalized communications that feel personal, relevant and curated just for them. To make it to their wishlist, brands must prioritize understanding their customers.
The holiday season is just around the corner, and with it comes a flurry of customer interactions—website clicks, email sign-ups, last-minute shopping carts, and festive campaign engagements. But here’s the challenge: we are living in an oversaturated digital environment where businesses collect vast amounts of data across multiple channels, creating endless opportunities to understand their customers better. But, that data is often scattered, fragmented, and disconnected.
Salesforce Data Cloud can process, organize and unify this vast amount of fragmented data – making it easy for you to understand who your customer really is and what they want and Identity Resolution plays a crucial role here.
What Is Identity Resolution?
Identity resolution is like being a detective for customer data. It connects the dots between fragmented data points to create a single, unified view of a customer.
Let’s say you have a customer named Zoey. She interacts with your brand in multiple ways:
- She visits your website and signs up for a newsletter using her personal email.
- She purchases a product via your mobile app using her work email.
- She contacts your support team through social media for help.
Without identity resolution, Zoey might appear as three different individuals in your systems. With identity resolution, however, all these interactions are linked together, giving you a complete picture of who Zoey is.
Identity resolution enables businesses to track and unify a customer’s journey across devices and channels. By tying multiple online identities to a single user, it provides insights into behaviors and buying stages, allowing marketers to deliver cohesive, personalized campaigns and gain a competitive edge.
How Does Identity Resolution Work?
Identity resolution in Salesforce Data Cloud operates through smart processes that link, deduplicate, and unify customer records across systems.
1. Data Mapping:
Data mapping aligns different data sources by connecting similar fields (like email or name), resolving naming differences, and adding custom attributes for unique details. In Salesforce Data Cloud, standardized models and prebuilt data model objects (DMOs) simplify this process. You can also create custom objects to tailor the data model. All of this helps build a unified Customer 360 view.
2. Identity Resolution:
Data Cloud Identity Resolution connects data about the same person or business across sources by using match rules (exact or fuzzy matches) to identify similarities and reconciliation rules to resolve conflicts and prioritize data. This creates unified profiles, which can be viewed and queried to understand consolidated customer information, such as linking Amazon S3 and Service Cloud data for a complete profile.
3. ID Graph
It’s like a central brain, storing all relationships between customer records. An ID graph is a database that connects a customer’s profile to all the personal information (PII) associated with them. This can include details like – physical address, email address, phone number, account usernames, device IDs etc. These details are gathered in the customer’s profile and linked with their behavioral data, like past purchases. The information is collected with the customer’s consent and stored in the ID graph for identity resolution.
The Benefits of Identity Resolution:
By investing in Salesforce Identity Resolution through Data Cloud, organizations unlock significant benefits:
Better Customer Understanding:
With a unified view of each customer, businesses can have a better idea about their preferences and interactions and accordingly deliver tailored experiences across channels. For customers, this could mean personalized product recommendations or seamless support interactions.Increased Operational Efficiency:
Identity resolution creates a global unique identifier for each individual helping businesses to federate queries across data stores. It also reduces manual efforts and errors in data management, saving time and resources.Improved Marketing ROI:
Identity resolution enables marketers to precisely measure campaign success and identify the most effective channels for engaging their audience. This insight helps them allocate budgets wisely, ensuring better results and higher returns on investment (ROI).Fraud Detection:
We are living in a world where sophisticated cyber threats and data breaches often bring businesses to their knees. Identity resolution plays a crucial role here in spotting and preventing fraud. With unified customer profiles, businesses can quickly identify unusual activities or inconsistencies in data patterns that signal potential fraud, ensuring better security and trust.Privacy Compliance:
With growing privacy regulations, traditional customer identification methods have become cumbersome and less reliable. For instance, when a customer asks to be removed from marketing communications, it often requires navigating through multiple siloed databases to opt them out of communications. Identity resolution platform simplifies this process by helping the marketers identify that customer from one privacy-compliant data location and quickly update subscription or privacy preferences across all connected systems, ensuring compliance while still gaining valuable customer insights. This also reassures customers that their data is handled securely and accurately.
The Future of Identity Resolution:
With the rise of the customer-centric business models, the importance of identity resolution will only grow. Salesforce Data Cloud is leading the way by using advanced AI and automation to solve one of the biggest challenges in customer data management.
Imagine a future where every interaction you have with a brand feels personalized, seamless, and intuitive — because businesses truly know you. That’s the promise of identity resolution. So, whether you’re a marketer, a customer service leader, or a business owner, Salesforce Identity Resolution is your key to unlocking the full potential of your data.
Let’s stop juggling fragmented data and start building deeper connections with every customer.
For more such data management insights, talk to our Data Cloud & AI experts.
