In today’s data-driven world, the ability to harness the power of information is crucial for businesses striving to stay competitive. However, many organizations continue to face a similar challenge – the need to accurately identify and link disparate data points about their customers to gain meaningful insights. This is where Identity Resolution (IDR), often referred to as Master Data Management (MDM), steps in as the unsung hero of data and analytics teams.
What is Identity Resolution?
Identity Resolution is the process of accurately matching and merging disparate data records to create a single, cohesive view of entities such as fans, customers, products, or assets.
IDR involves:
- Reconciling record inconsistencies
- Resolving duplicates
- Establishing relationships across datasets
This process helps organizations to gain a 360-degree view of their customers across the business to better understand and engage with them in the future.
While it may sound like a mundane task, its importance cannot be overstated in the world of data management. Here are six reasons why organizations can benefit from properly implementing an IDR capability.
1. Enhance Customer Understanding
Understanding customer behavior and preferences is critical for delivering personalized experiences. Identity Resolution enables businesses to create a unified view of customers by linking information from various touch points such as transactions, interactions, and demographics. This holistic view promotes better customer engagement and enables targeted marketing initiatives and predictive analytics.
2. Achieve Data Accuracy and Consistency
Data inconsistency and inaccuracy are common challenges for organizations dealing with increasing amounts of data from multiple sources. Without a centralized approach to managing data identities, businesses risk making decisions based on incomplete or incorrect information. Identity Resolution ensures that data is cleansed, standardized, and consistently represented across systems, leading to improved data quality and reliability.
3. Facilitate Regulatory Compliance
With the increasing focus on data privacy and security regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, organizations are under pressure to ensure the lawful handling of personal information. Identity Resolution plays a crucial role in achieving compliance by providing a comprehensive view of data subjects and their consent preferences. By accurately identifying and managing personal data across systems, businesses can mitigate the risk of regulatory penalties and reputation damage.
4. Empower Advanced Analytics
Effective data analysis relies on the ability to connect and correlate diverse datasets to uncover valuable insights. Identity Resolution acts as the foundation for advanced analytics initiatives, such as machine learning and predictive modeling. More importantly, by creating a unified data environment, organizations can break down silos, uncover hidden patterns, and drive informed decision-making across the business.
5. Drive Operational Efficiency
Inefficient data management processes can lead to wasted resources, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities. Identity Resolution streamlines data integration, reduces redundancy, and automates routine tasks, resulting in significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. By eliminating data silos and encouraging collaboration, businesses can improve time-to-insight and gain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
6. Future-Proofing Data Strategies
As the volume and complexity of data continues to grow, organizations must future-proof their data strategies to stay ahead of the curve. Identity Resolution provides a scalable and adaptable framework for managing evolving data landscapes, ensuring that businesses can effectively harness the power of data to drive innovation and growth. By investing in robust MDM solutions and practices, organizations can develop a framework for long-term success in the digital age.
Laying the Groundwork
Identity Resolution is not just a technical necessity, but a strategic necessity for data and analytics teams. By mastering the art of data identity management, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data assets, drive business transformation, and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Embrace Identity Resolution today and pave the way for a data-driven future.
Data Clymer has implemented Identity Resolution solutions for many clients. Each of these organizations has been able to reduce the number of unique individuals within their customer databases and realize the benefits described above. This has enabled them to more effectively market to different customer segments and feel more confident in the methods through which they are interacting with those customers.
To implement an IDR solution, there are several pieces of data infrastructure that we recommend:
Cloud Data Warehouse
At the core of the IDR solution is a cloud data warehouse to store your data to gain a single source of truth. For this, we recommend Snowflake Data Cloud or Databricks to power the process.
ELT (Extract, Load, Transform)
To streamline the process of extracting, transforming, and loading data from various sources into a data warehouse, you’ll need to invest in an ELT tool. We recommend Matillion, as it integrates directly with your cloud data warehouse, creating a seamless connection between the two.
dbt, or Data Build Tool, is a powerful tool that we recommend to transform and model data directly within the database. Its strength lies in its ability to apply version control, testing, and documentation to SQL-based transformations. It is crucial in the IDR solution because it is used to model the raw data prior to its syncing with the IDR tool itself to ensure the data is in the best structure possible to be utilized for IDR.
Data Activation (or Reverse-ETL)
The last piece of the IDR solution involves synchronizing your data from your data warehouse to various operational systems and applications in a process generally known as Reverse-ETL. Hightouch is a comprehensive tool that not only offers Reverse-ETL, but also an Identity Resolution product offering which integrates directly into your cloud data warehouse. In this IDR solution, Hightouch does a lot of the heavy lifting to standardize the raw data and resolve entities from multiple sources.
The San Francisco Giants Hit a Home Run with Identity Resolution
The Giants had hordes of avid fans and swaths of fan data that was disorganized, inaccessible, and siloed across the organization. The challenge was putting it all together to gain insight. The team partnered with Data Clymer to implement Snowflake and an IDR solution that put timely, accurate insights into the hands of those who need them.
Within weeks, the Giants had a better understanding of their fans, including deeper insight into ticketing, stadium data, forecasting, and ad-hoc game-day analytics.
RESULTS:
- Accelerated time to insight by 50%
- De-duplicated and reduced fan records by 15%
- Gained a 360-degree view of fan data and insights
- Put more accurate and useful data in the hands of several departments
Want to Better Understand Your Customers?
Research shows that data-driven organizations are more profitable, successful, and resilient. To learn more about how an Identity Resolution solution can help your organization remain competitive, get started with a free 30-minute data strategy assessment.