What is identity resolution and how can data management help

It’s no secret that customer experience is a top priority for businesses across all industries. Identity resolution has become a key driver to uncover individuals across lines of business, which helps leaders better understand who their customers are and better deliver a personalized experience. Knowing who your customers are can do so much more for your business!

Let’s dive into what identity resolution is and why data management is a vital part of an identity solution.  

What is identity resolution? 

Identity resolution brings individuals’ records together across an enterprise, typically through a reference file. 

You may want identity resolution for targeting and campaign suppression lists, frequency management, insight measurement, content and offer personalization, data sharing, and more. This strategy is essential to connect disparate data sources and operationalize data for a variety of overarching initiatives like streamlined operations, risk management, or improved customer experience. 

Picture this: If John Smith uses ABC Banking for his mortgage, credit card, and savings/ checking account, there’s a chance ABC Banking isn’t aware that he is a member across the different lines of business. With reference data, ABC Banking can connect the dots between the various databases and be confident that John Smith is, in fact, John Smith, and a member across various ABC Banking services. Now, ABC Banking can determine how they want to continue their customer relationship with John Smith.  

Having this single view of your customers can help to cut costs by saving time navigating multiple databases for information. Identity resolution allows you to streamline operations and bridge the gap across business units and departments.  

How can data management help? 

Data management ensures your data is standardized, harmonized, and augmented as part of identity resolution. In other words, you can be sure your data is ready for the reference file.  

By powering your identity strategy with data management, you can automatically connect disparate data sources to remove duplicates, correct errors, and standardize formats.  

If a full-blown data management platform is out of scope for you right now, that is okay! There are opportunities to still cleanse your data and make it fit for identity resolution. For instance, contact data validation could be a great first step for you to enable a big project like identity. This could mean verifying your customer emails, addresses, and phone numbers in either real-time or batch cleanse.  

Top 5 benefits to having data management as part of identity resolution  

Most importantly, embedding high-quality data into your workflow ensures the right information is being leveraged for analysis, reporting, and decision-making. When incorporating data management as part of identity resolution, you will find:  

• Better understanding of your customers 
• Easier navigation across databases
• Improved marketing ROI
• Streamlined communication cross-departmentally
• Reduced risk of unnecessary costs

Identity resolution is the key to knowing who your customers are. With data management, not only will you be upholding the integrity of your databases, but you will have confidence that the right information is being referenced to identify your customers.  

Interested in maximizing your identity strategy with high-quality data? Experian can help.

Contact us today