Got a Customer Data Management Problem? Try Identity Resolution

Managing Customer Data Well Is Critical to a Company’s Success

How a company manages its customer data is of critical importance: it can indeed be of decisive importance to its success or failure. In the new digital environment, companies are having to learn to cope with a vastly increased velocity of business and the data that is generated by it. Customers are interacting with a company via many different platforms, with frequently different user identification information, and any other data collected from a customer may differ from one interaction to the next. The amount of customer data that reaches a company and is stored by it has skyrocketed to the point where managing it is a major issue.

A Big Part of the Challenge Is That Customer Data Has Been Decentralized across an Organization

Within companies data handling has become extremely decentralized, with different data about the same customer scattered across the enterprise in different stores. However, the employee dealing with a specific customer still needs to have complete data about them at their fingertips to better serve the customer. And customers are always expecting fast and correct responsiveness.

A key goal of effective customer data management is identifying partial, related data in two or more different data stores that needs to be consolidated. In this way a company can build up a complete picture of a customer, regardless of where the data originally came from.

How Identity Resolution Enhances Customer Data Management

Identity Resolution, also known as Entity Resolution, takes all the data pertaining to customers coming in from different channels and groups it into single records which contains all the information pertaining to a single individual. This is what has been termed the Customer Stitching challenge. Identity Resolution performs accurate fuzzy entity matching of data such as:

• Names: Samuel Clemens vs. S. Clemens vs. S.L. Clemens vs. Samuel L. Clemens
• Addresses: 18 Fourteenth Street, Dallas, Texas vs. 18 14^th St., Dallas, TX

Identity Resolution is able to match probabilistically, i.e., it can calculate similarity scores for each individual field and then combine those scores to produce an overall likelihood match for the two records.

There will also be many instances where an item such as an email address will differ completely between records, e.g., a customer provides a personal gmail address on one platform versus a corporate one on another. Identity Resolution allows the contribution of each field to the overall matching score to be weighted, so that the impact of a complete mismatch of one field is minimized when there is otherwise a good match.

Identity Resolution Increases an Organization’s Effectiveness

In sum, good Customer Data Management requires effective and accurate Identity Resolution applied to fields such as personal names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. It will increase the effectiveness of any organization that adopts it. Identity Resolution will give customer-facing employees a complete and accurate picture of the customer they are communicating with and enable them to make the best decisions to maximize that customer’s satisfaction.