Identity Matching Concepts

This lesson will explain what identity matching is and how it can help improve both the customer experience and business results.

Customers typically interact with a business through multiple devices and channels.

For example, a customer can use a web browser to visit a company's website from her laptop at work, her mobile phone during lunch, and her tablet later at home. Each of these devices and browsing sessions can be uniquely identified.

Identity Matching correlates anonymous interactions, such as impressions and click-throughs on your website, with a known customer.

A partial correlation can happen when a match occurs with one of the customer’s attributes, such as a cookie ID or an IP address from a previous browsing session.

Or, the customer may browse from the same device on which she opened an email sent by your marketing department.

The strongest correlation occurs when the customer identifier is recognized, which can happen when the customer signs on, for instance.

Under certain circumstances, this correlation may only be temporary. Perhaps she is using a public terminal and the cookie is shared between users. So in spite of her logging in, it may still not be possible to correctly match all of her recorded activity to a known customer identity.

However, every partial match supplies the business with high-quality interaction data, which helps create a more complete, integrated view of the customer.

Once a reasonable amount of matching data has been recorded, the business can use the data from the customer’s previous interactions to make better decisions about a current interaction.

To summarize, Identity Matching correlates an anonymous user's behavior with a customer that the business already knows. It gives the business a richer view of the customer, which can be used for making better decisions.