frameworks to improve customer experience and resolve identity issues //

The digital customer journey has never been more fragmented. Marketers are faced with a greater challenge in resolving customer identities. Marketers can still have hope if they focus on customer use cases.

At The MarTech Conference , Greg Krehbiel said, “Use Cases are more important than Identity, and you should think from the perspective of your customers.”

“Resolving Identity can interfere with your use cases, and create a poor customer experience,” Krehbiel explained.

Two frameworks to keep in mind when addressing identity resolution.

Device frame

Krehbiel said that everyone thinks people visit their website, but this is not true. It’s a device making a request for your website.

There is a person using the device. To determine who is using the device, you need to adopt a framework which starts with it.

Device profile. Your customer’s device has an identifier. This information can be used to create a simple call-to action to help move the customer’s journey forward. If the device is a smartphone, for example, the next step could be to ask the customer to download an application.

Activity. Marketing professionals can also use the activity of customers to learn more about them and move them along. What type of content do they click on? You could, for instance, ask all readers to complete a survey related to the article.

Identifiers. Here, customers can share their phone number, email address, or any other form of identification to get more information, purchase products, or perform other actions.

These identifiers are often linked to anonymous actions. This matching isn’t 100% accurate — some matches are more reliable than others.

A marketer, for example, can add links to an email and have the recipient click on them. Each email is assigned a record ID by the email service provider. Your website can add the record ID to the web profile of the customer when they click on the link. Now, the anonymous website visitor is connected to an email. This adds another dimension to the client.

This match isn’t 100% accurate because the link in the email could have been shared with others or posted on social media, which would lead to activity by someone other than who received the email.

Person. As the number of identifiers increases, marketers will be able to engage customers more effectively because they can resolve the customer into a single buyer or person. The deterministic match is when profiles are only linked if they share the same identifier. They can also use probabilistic match, which uses AI and links profiles that have a high likelihood of being the same person based on data such as behavior.

Krehbiel said that once you have resolved the issue with a specific person, then you are able to be more confident. You can promote newsletters and talk about account information, renewals, and other things.

Big Lots’ identity roadmap: Dig deeper

Person frame

It is a good strategy to get to know your customers better by resolving identities based on use cases which begin at the device-level. There’s a better way — using a framework that puts the person first.

Krehbiel explained that if you only focus on what you can measure you often miss the bigger picture. The device framework can be compared to the left brain measurement side of the brain, while the person framework represents the creative right brain side.

Start with the concept of your customers as people, without any digital baggage. Online, people often only share a small part of their personality depending on which platform or channel they use. A person may use one account to communicate with friends and family and another for professional purposes. Facebook, for example, encourages people to be themselves by prohibiting them from having multiple accounts. However many people compartmentalize.

Device. First, think about the person. Then consider all the ways that they avoid paying for content and sharing their data online.

Krehbiel explained that you should first think about the profile of the individual and then make a list. Then you move on to the device profile, and think about how you can prevent it from happening.

Identifiers. There are different forms of digital fingerprinting depending on the device that can be used to identify returning users, even when they use Incognito Mode in their browser.

It’s not as important to catch cheaters as it is to imagine how customers are dividing their online existence.

In a B2B scenario, for example, it is likely that a customer has both a business and personal email address. It’s best to avoid merging these accounts, keeping in mind the customer’s preference. Sending an email from a personal to a business account will not improve the customer’s experience.

Personas. Continue fleshing out the activities and requirements of the customer based on each device and identifier. If your customer uses multiple email addresses, the first one could be for their salaried job, while the second might be for another career or side hustle.

Find the best way to reach your customers based on their preferences.

Krehbiel said, “As your work progresses, as you try to resolve identity and merge records to create a single customer record, consider the use cases from the person framework or the device framework. “Find out the best data structure, the best merging strategies, and other things you can do to create a great customer experience,” said Krehbiel.

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