CRM identity resolution: Why it’s not really what it claims to be!

On the surface, CRM systems give the appearance of covering most things you might need when you are looking for technology to help you manage relationships with customers. But the reality is that they have been designed to only deliver the basics, so CRM identity resolution often fails to deliver a full single customer view.

To understand why let’s take a deeper look into what CRM identity resolution does and doesn’t deliver.

  • CRM systems manage what they call ‘contacts’ but these are usually only matched together using email addresses. Customers in fact have many different identifiers like mobile phone numbers, cookie IDs, postal addresses, account numbers etc and there are usually multiple versions of each relating to a single customer. All versions of these personal identifiers need to be stored so that customers reaching you through multiple channels can be properly identified.
  • Next CRM systems only include a part of your customer data. Your customers browse your website, they visit specific pages, they arrive there via different forms of on-line advertising, and all this vital information needs to be included in your single customer view.
  • CRM systems may report sales at a company or salesman level but they don’t look at longer term customer value, or how different channels and different customer recruitment propositions bring different types of customers with different kinds of customer needs.
  • CRM systems may undertake bulk email campaigns, but these are not usually synchronised with other channels such as post or SMS; also given that they don’t generate any added value customer knowledge such as probability of response or likelihood of attrition, the selections they make can only be via quite simplistic filters.
  • CRM systems were born out of the need to enable sales forces to record their activities and results; they were not designed to ingest data from multiple online and offline sources, and deliver a complete customer view.

Over the last five years or so a new breed of technology, Customer Data Platforms or CDPs, have been developed to allow you to properly relate to customers, and to make all aspects of your marketing accountable so that for instance an online order can now be linked back to the several online and offline contacts that preceded it.

Find out more about what a customer data platform is.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Why marketers may still need to find a ‘true’ customer data platform?

With all the power of the major CRM packages, this may sound like a stupid question; but we have had multiple clients that use CRM vendors come to us recently because they are not getting the ‘true’ customer data platform, and hence single customer view, they need.

And these clients come from very different sectors including sport, financial services, and charity.

A single customer view that isn’t ‘true’ has some unfortunate consequences.

It becomes very difficult to accurately fulfil GDPR Subject Access Requests if Mr Smith appears several times in the system. It can lead to wasteful and irritating communications such as sending two emails to the same person at the same time. It will mean that you can be treating the same person as a high value customer and as one that has become dormant. It can mean you’re submitting an existing customer to a welcome programme because they changed their email address. It makes your dashboards describing customer recruitment and attrition inaccurate, and so on and so forth.

We believe that the problem has arisen for two key reasons:

  1. the simple one is that the CRMs may let different users set up the same individual multiple times on the system without warnings, unless the contacts provided are absolutely identical
  2. the more complicated one is that correctly identifying individuals is in fact far from simple.

So, you may have an individual with a work email and the same individual with personal email, but they share the same mobile phone number and cookie ID.

They may use a different weekend and weekday name and address, but the same email. Or they may have several devices, hence cookie IDs, but a single email address. And so it goes on.

When we set about designing UniFida, our cloud-based customer data platform, we recognised that correctly identifying people is not only very important, but also very difficult.

So we decided to store as many different types of identifiers as we could. And most importantly to store the history of them, so that we never delete an identifier, unless of course someone is exercising their right to be forgotten.

It does mean that our system has to do a lot more work when new data arrives, because it has to look at all possible identifiers belonging to all personal records before deciding where to place new information.

And that can have interesting results. As well as bringing in new identifiers to an existing record, perhaps a new cookie ID, it can in some cases link together two people whom the system had been previously keeping separate. For instance two different email addresses can be found to have the same mobile phone number, and belong to the same person.

We call the process Purning, because we create a permanent URN, or unique reference number, for each individual, and that stays the same, even if over time all their identifiers may have changed.

As long as we can link a new identifier to an existing one, we know where to put the data that accompanies it.

Anthony and Julian of UniFida

Meet two of our team, Anthony and Julian, demonstrating UniFida.

Contact us if you are interested in a no-obligation chat about how we can help your business.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database?

So has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database? ‘Personal data’ is defined in GDPR as ‘any information relating to a person who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that person’.

So each of us can be seen as ‘bristling’ with multiple potential identifiers, any or all of which may be stored by organisations using our personal data. And to add another layer of complexity, most of the commonly used identifiers, like email addresses or mobile phone numbers, may change on a regular basis.

All of us, as data subjects, can ask any organisation holding their data,for their personal data to be deleted, or transferred, or not to be used for marketing communications, or for profiling, or sold to anyone else etc. etc.

We may also change our minds about how our data can be used, and most probably forget what we have requested in the first place, because it’s not at all important to us.

So, for example, using our name and address as our ID, we request that organisation X does not profile our data, whilst using our email we ask to have our data deleted, and via our mobile phone number then expect to have our recent order traced.

GDPR tacitly assumes that persons about whom personal data is held can each be recognised uniquely, across all the identifiers they care to use, and as they change identifiers over time; and that from this basis rational interpretations can be made of their instructions.

This is evidently a delusion.

As vendors of a technology to build single customer views we know how difficult the identity problem is. The normal ‘shrinkage’ when we deduplicate a customer base across just say a couple of identifiers is around 20-25%; the more the types of identifier the greater the chance of duplicate records.

The technology we have developed to try to solve the problem is called UniFida, and it approaches the question of personal identifiers in a rather different way. It assumes, correctly, that all our common identifiers like email addresses, mobile numbers, cookie IDs etc. will change over time, and that individuals may have multiple versions of them.

So, it stores a history, for each individual, of all the identifiers it has been able to link. When an identifier arrives at UniFida as part of an on-line or off-line data feed, it searches the entire library of identifiers to see if it can get a match. In this way, it brings as much information about an individual together as is possible.

Has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database? To find out a little more about UniFida please contact us. It may make complying with GDPR a little bit more possible.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.