Identity Resolution Use-Cases

Identity Resolution helps create a unified view of the user across devices, apps, and unique identifiers. Identity resolution is critical to understanding the customer journey at multiple touch points, which allows brands to deliver personalized experiences to its customers at scale.

Anonymous to known identification

Identity Resolution allows a company to link a customer’s journey from pre-account creation to post-account activity. This is important to help a brand understand the behaviors that lead a user to convert from a window shopper in the discovery stage to a buyer with intent in the consideration and decision stage to the loyal return customer in the conversion and retention stage.

By linking any anonymous events a user had before creating an account to a user’s logged-in activity, a marketing team can now have a complete understanding of a user’s past interactions with your app.

This can lead to invaluable insights into the behaviors and triggers in an app that motivate a user to register for an account.

Cross-device identification

Users can have multiple touch points with an app ecosystem through more than one device. For example, users might view an eCommerce site through a mobile native app, a mobile web browser, or a desktop web browser.

By tracking a user’s activity across all platforms, brands will be able to more efficiently target campaigns to users as they’ll have the knowledge of funnels that complete across devices.

For example, a user who adds a product to a cart on the iPhone app but completes the checkout on the Android app shouldn’t be targeted with abandoned cart push notifications on the iPhone app.

Cross-app identification

A company’s product ecosystem may also spread out across multiple apps.

If a company needs to understand a user’s activity across all apps, Segment recommends connecting all sources to the same Space. This provides a comprehensive view of a user’s activity across the entire app ecosystem.

If, however, each app should maintain its own metrics and LTV analysis, regardless of the overlap of users between apps, Segment recommends creating a separate Space per app and only connecting sources related to each app to its space. This will give a siloed view of how users interact with each individual app.

To learn more, visit Segment’s eCommerce Example doc.

Cross-Channel identification

A user can interact with a brand through multiple channels and departments. A user might have touch points with a sales team, a marketing team, and a customer support team throughout their customer journey. It’s important for companies to have insights into these cross-functional activities to ensure they understand the complete customer experience.

For example, if a user has logged a complaint with a customer support team, the marketing team should exclude this user from an automatic follow-up email asking for them to leave a public product review on their site.