It’s crunch time for accurate customer identity. Today, brands are capturing more customer data than ever before across a multiple channels, devices and touch points. But many companies struggle with using that data to create useful customer identity profiles – “identity graphs” – that can greatly improve marketing campaigns, customer experiences and more.

1. Better Customer Experience
Customers increasingly expect brands to engage them in highly relevant, individualized ways, with accurately targeted content. Companies that are successful at customer identity resolution can confidently create content and deploy 1:1 customer engagement strategies and tactics that take customer experiences to another level.

Equally as important, brands can avoid misidentifying or engaging customers in ways they perceive to be intrusive or even creepy. Having accurate identity information also helps Marketing support the company’s commitments to good data stewardship, which reinforces brand trust and reputation.

2. New Revenue Opportunities
Insights gained through identity resolution can greatly increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities and reveal new ways to re-engage former customers.

3. Superior Results with Less Budget
Timely and accurate identity resolution allows brands to market more efficiently and spend less to achieve the same, or even better, results. Accurate ID graphs reduce waste, overlap and duplication.

4. A Single Unified Internal View of Your Customers
Companies that aren’t using quality ID graphs to regularly synchronize and validate their data often end up with disparate views of customers across various business units. They can never be sure who is on the other end of a browser or mobile app.

What’s more, many brands have compiled their internal data by relying only on de-duping across their own data points such as same-name spellings, emails, addresses etc. But that’s insufficient. For instance, the brand may not recognize the same person interacting with two different emails or shipping to work and home addresses. True accuracy requires external validation against a known, proven ID graph recognize bad data, fix it, and fit together fragments and missing pieces of the identity puzzle.

Accurate identity resolution allows companies to create a true, single view of their customers that can be consistently leveraged across a portfolio of brands, business units and product lines. Accurate identity resolution enables brands to continuously enrich, update and share identity data across the entire organization to facilitate greater control and personalization.

5. More Accurate Measurement & Better ROI
Robust data sets and high customer match rates across screens and platforms helps to create a more complete picture of customers. This, in turn, makes marketing measurement and analytics easier and more accurate. Marketers will be able to holistically measure results and fuel their analytics engine.

Without identity resolution, multi-touch attribution results can be misleading because the same person has been counted several times. Marketers need to resolve identity across devices in order to count unique touch points and attribute ad spend to results correctly.

As the number of consumer touch points grows, so does the quantity of data collected, causing analytic teams to struggle at providing an accurate view of marketing ROI. With a well-constructed approach to identity, marketers can create a single, holistic view that more accurately measures customer interactions across all channels including digital, mobile, website, phone, and store visits.

6. Livelier Marketing Creative & Campaigns
Knowing more about customers also allows marketers to create campaigns that are more interesting, relevant, engaging and generally pack more punch. One can avoid campaigns that are dull, generic, and miss the mark.

7. Greater Speed & Flexibility
Marketers must be highly flexible and adaptive to hit constantly moving and changing targets. Having the ability to quickly and accurately identify customers across screens and channels gives marketers greater flexibility and allows them to react more quickly to changing conditions. For example, brands can quickly adjust messaging when they have confidence knowing who a customer is, where they are and what they are doing.

8. Fill Customer Intelligence Gaps
The more data sources there are, the greater the chance gaps will appear if those data sources aren’t properly linked. Marketers can solve that by continuously corroborating, verifying, and appending missing information across customer records, to produce a 360-degree customer view.

9. Identify Customers Online in Real-time
The ability to identify a quality lead or an existing customer in real-time on your website is crucial. With an identity framework in action, brands can identify a prospect the moment a website visit occurs, thus improving the customer experience. Brands will, for example, be able to accurately identify an existing loyalist even if that customer hasn’t been authenticated through a login and act accordingly.

10. Improved Marketing Credibility
Marketing organizations that are able to accurately identify customers and engage them in personalized ways earn greater stature and credibility internally (not to mention budget clout). Painting an accurate picture of customers allows brands to create and communicate compelling success stories, earning more brand equity.