Every business is sitting on a pile of fragmented customer data—email addresses, website visits, CRM records, purchase history, and social media interactions. But without identity resolution, these data points stay disconnected, leaving businesses with duplicate records, wasted marketing spend, and an incomplete view of their customers.
So how do companies actually resolve identities? What’s the methodology behind linking different data points to the same person or account?
The first step in identity resolution is ingesting data from every possible source. This includes first-party data such as website visits, CRM records, purchase history, and email interactions. It also involves third-party data from ad clicks, intent signals, and external data providers, as well as behavioral data from app usage, content engagement, and social media interactions. Without centralized data collection, identity resolution is impossible. If your customer data lives in separate silos, you’ll never get a full picture.
Most customer data is messy, inconsistent, and full of errors. Before identities can be resolved, the data must be cleaned and standardized. This includes fixing formatting issues by standardizing names, addresses, and phone numbers across systems, removing duplicate records, and correcting typos or outdated emails. If your data isn’t clean and standardized, identity resolution will create false matches—or worse, miss real connections.
This is where the real magic happens. Identity matching uses deterministic and probabilistic techniques to link records and unify identities.
Deterministic matching, also known as exact matching, connects records based on definitive identifiers like email addresses, phone numbers, or account logins. If the same email appears across different records, those profiles are merged automatically. This method is highly accurate but limited since it relies on matching exact fields.
Probabilistic matching, or fuzzy matching, uses AI and machine learning to identify similarities across different data points, even when they aren’t identical. For example, if "John Smith" and "J. Smith" have the same phone number and similar browsing behavior, the system can infer they are the same person. This method can match incomplete or inconsistent data but requires strong algorithms to avoid false matches.
Without strong matching techniques, businesses either miss key connections or merge the wrong identities—both of which lead to bad decisions and wasted resources.
Once identities are matched, all relevant data points are merged into a unified profile. Each profile combines online and offline data such as website activity, CRM interactions, and in-store purchases. It also links multiple devices and touchpoints, tracking how a single user engages across mobile, desktop, and email. This dynamic profile updates automatically as new data comes in.
A single, 360-degree view of the customer enables better marketing, sales, and customer experiences. Without it, businesses are left making blind decisions based on incomplete information.
Having a clean, unified customer profile is great—but it’s useless unless you activate it. Identity resolution helps businesses apply resolved data for marketing, sales, fraud prevention, and customer experience.
Marketing teams can use identity resolution for more accurate ad targeting and suppression of existing customers from acquisition campaigns. Sales teams get clearer lead tracking and can personalize outreach based on the full customer journey. Fraud prevention teams can identify duplicate or fake accounts, while customer experience teams can ensure seamless, personalized interactions.
Identity resolution isn’t just about cleaning data—it’s about making data work for your business.
A customer visits your website on their phone, signs up for an email newsletter with a different email, and later buys your product using their desktop. Without identity resolution, your system sees them as three different people, marketing keeps retargeting them with irrelevant ads, and customer service doesn’t know they already made a purchase.
With identity resolution, all touchpoints are linked, creating one unified profile. Marketing stops wasting ad dollars, sales knows exactly where they are in the buyer journey, and customer support can deliver a seamless experience.
Many companies fail at identity resolution due to messy, incomplete data, siloed data across departments, and over-reliance on third-party data. Messy data prevents accurate matching, siloed data leads to disconnected customer profiles, and third-party data is becoming less reliable as privacy regulations tighten.
Companies that invest in first-party data, AI-powered matching, and cross-platform identity tracking will be the ones that win.
Your customer data shouldn’t be a liability—it should be your biggest competitive advantage.
View the Identity Resolution Slide Deck to see how it works. If you’re ready to start using identity resolution the right way, you can purchase it here.
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