Beyond CCaaS: What is Identity Resolution and Why is it Important for Outbound Contact Centers?

Phrases like a “360-degree view of the customer” and “single pane of glass” have been tossed around by CCaaS providers for decades. What they encapsulate is the idea that if you have every piece of information about a customer in a single view – including data originated from disparate systems (e.g,. your website, your payments system, your support center) – then you can drive more personalized experiences for customers and less context switching for agents. 

However, in practice, when most of a prospect’s browsing behavior is done anonymously (before they submit their phone number or create an account) and across multiple devices and channels (ads, mobile, web, email, SMS, phone calls, etc.), this is very hard. So instead, legacy CCaaS providers including Talkdesk, Genesys, Five9 resort to relying on a single identifier of a customer. Pre-sale they rely on phone number (missing all of your behaviors prior to submitting this data), and post sale, they rely on a customer Id from your database or CRM.

This leads to disjointed, incomplete views of prospects and botched customer experiences like the following:

You’re browsing an education company’s mobile site for a bootcamp program, and after comparing the prices of a couple of courses, you select the 6-week Python course in Austin, Texas for this winter. You submit your email to start the application. Then life happens and you put your phone away. Later, you check your email, and see a marketing email from the education company reminding you to complete the application for the course. But you realize you first have some questions. From the email you click on the CTA that says “Live Text to Learn More” and submit a text from your mobile phone. When the agent responds back (“Hi this is Jane from EducationCo, how can I help you?”) you start from the beginning and explain what program you’re interested in, what city, when, what price point, etc. The first 10 minutes of the conversation are wasted with information the company already had about you. 

This happens because legacy CCaaS do not have Identity Resolution processes that can stitch together your behavior across different devices and channels to determine that you are the same person across all of those touch points. Likely, there were 2 profiles created for you – one that captured your submission of your email (likely your open and click of that email was stuck in an ESP) and one that captured your inbound call. So that when you texted in, the agent and CCaaS system had no clue about your web-browsing behavior prior to submitting your email, nor your receiving, opening and clicking of the marketing email, which is why you received a completely generic message from the agent that wasted both their time and yours, and might as well have come from a company you’d never interacted with before. 

What is Identity Resolution?

Identity Resolution is the process of merging the complete history of each customer into a single profile, no matter where they interact with your business. Identity resolution allows you to understand a user’s interactions across web, mobile, email, phone, and any other channel by tracking and associating anonymous Ids (e.g. web cookies, device Ids), email addresses, phone numbers, and customer external Ids such as a database identifier. Under the hood, Identity Resolution requires building an identity graph – of every customer and their associated identifiers collected over many pieces of data across channels and devices – in order to associate any past and future actions to the right profile.

Why Does Identity Resolution Matter in an Outbound Contact Center?

When deciding who to reach out to, when, on what channel and with what message – the more data you can use to personalize that interaction, the more likely your outreach will resonate with the customer and lead to the desired business outcome. 

In particular, selling high-consideration products and services requires a more personalized touch, which respects the complex non-linear decision journey a customer might take. To do effective outbound orchestration and have the highest quality conversations, contact center platforms and agents need important context about who they're calling or texting and why, otherwise the result is ineffective, cookie-cutter conversations. 

If the customer was initially browsing for one product before they created an account, and you reach out to them about another, that message is less likely to be relevant or lead to a sale. If instead you reach out about the right product and can tell them how it compares to a competitor product that they’ve mentioned they’ve evaluated, that’s more likely to resonate and result in sale. 

Remember the student searching for a Python bootcamp? What if instead there had been a single identity-resolved profile that contained all of the prospective student’s browsing, email engagement and SMS interactions, the agent could have responded: “Hi - this is Jane from EducationCo. We’re excited to see you’re interested in our 6-week Python course in Austin this winter. That course has a 98% satisfaction score - great choice! How can I help you get started on your new career path?”

Personalized experiences like that lead to much higher engagement and revenue.

Lack of good Identity Resolution instead leads to:

• Incomplete or duplicate profiles
• Violation of consumer privacy regulations such as GDPR and TCPA opt in
• Data quality issues
• A fragmented view of the customer journey
• Inaccurate personalization based on bad or missing data or no personalization at all.

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How Does Regal’s Identity Resolution Work?

Regal’s Identity Resolution process uses deterministic matching to attribute every piece of incoming data to a contact profile. When new events are produced with one or more combinations of identifiers, Regal’s Identity Resolution determines which profile it belongs to based on each brand’s unique set of Identity Resolution rules, and adds the event and associated identifiers to that profile. If no matching profile is found, Regal creates a new contact profile. 

Identifiers

Regal considers a few types of identifiers when looking for a matching contact profile:

• Anonymous Ids – this type of identifier is typically found on events emitted from Customer Data Platforms (CPDs or other click tracking systems) that capture anonymous browsing behavior, i.e., prior to a customer inputting a formal identifier
• Phone Numbers (many are accepted; one can be designated as primary)
• Email Addresses (many are accepted; one can be designated as primary)
• Integration Ids - identifiers from our native Salesforce and Hubspot integrations, such as account_id, contact_id, lead_id
• External Id – meant to represent your application/database ID once a user has created an account

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Using Identifiers to Find Matching Profiles

Each brand can define its own Identity Resolution Settings for their Regal account. Two settings apply when Regal uses identifiers to look for a matching contact profile: (1) Lookup Order and (2) Uniqueness Constraint.

Setting 1: Lookup Order

This is the priority order of the different identifier types listed in the previous section that Regal will cycle through in order to find a matching contact profile. Brands may specify a global look up order that will apply to all of their data sources (e.g., Segment, Calendly, Salesforce, etc.), or a different lookup order per source.

For example, let's say you specify the following look up order: external id → primary phone → phones → primary email → emails → anonymous id. For each event, Regal will search across all existing contact profiles to see if any have the same external Id as the event because that is the first identifier in the lookup order. If so, the event will get added to that profile. If not, Regal will search by the next identifier in the lookup order: the primary phone. And so on until a matching profile is found. The search process stops as soon as a match is found even if additional identifiers are present. If no contact profile matches, on any of the identifiers, Regal will create a new contact profile and add the event to it.

Setting 2: Uniqueness Constraint

A uniqueness constraint can be applied to Integration Ids and/or the External Id, such that a single profile can have only one value for the identifier and it cannot be updated. For example, if an event containing a new External Id finds an existing profile via a match on primary phone number, but that existing profile already has a different value for External Id, this constraint will force the system to create a new profile from the event rather than update the existing profile with a new External Id. The result will be 2 contact profiles sharing the same phone number but with different External Ids (this for example could represent a case of a shared phone number such as a landline between 2 distinct customers such as roommates).

The combination of making External Id first in the lookup order and adding a uniqueness constraint to External Id, means Regal will create a new contact profile for each unique External Id observed by Regal (thereby making External Id your unique identifier for a profile in Regal).

‍Why Does Regal Use Deterministic Instead of Probabilistic Identity Resolution?

There are 2 approaches to Identity Resolution: Probabilistic modeling uses predictive algorithms to match behavior to the user profiles they probably belong to, sometimes using “fuzzy” matches to associate data to profiles such as same first and last name or similar address. Deterministic matching uses first-party data to link engagement to customer profiles only when common personally identifiable information (PII) is shared and matches exactly.

Predictive algorithms are never 100% accurate, so there’s a margin for error baked into probabilistic matching. That’s likely fine for analytics use cases where inferences about groups of users are being drawn, but in a Contact Center setting, where 1:1 personalization is key and you may be sharing personal information over the phone, probabilistic Identity Resolution can lead to poor customer experiences and unintended privacy violations.

Deterministic matching prioritizes accuracy and is the more responsible approach.

Identity Resolution Use Cases for Contact Centers

We’ve found that across high-consideration B2C industries, a robust Identity Resolution process leads to cleaner and more accurate profiles, and therefore better personalization. However, in particular, healthcare, lending and education are the industries that present the most complex use cases and benefit the most from Identity Resolution. In healthcare, Identity Resolution can improve ~5-10% of customer profiles because of landlines (and more so if you primarily serve older populations). In lending that rises to 10-20% because of co-borrowers. Finally, in education, it can be as high as 30% of profiles for Online Program Managers (OPMs) who run enrollment for many universities that the same students may be applying to.

Here are 3 use cases where a Identity Resolution can be most impactful:

1. A single customer may have multiple phone numbers. A common example of this is when a customer has a mobile number, work number, and home landline. Another example is a married couple that share a single account with a brand (e.g., a joint checking account), but add both their cell phones to the account. In these examples, traditional CCaaS would treat all of these numbers as separate contacts, which could result in poor, non-personalized interactions, such as redundant messaging. Regal, however, can stitch all these numbers to the same unified profile, so an inbound call from any of them would pull up the same conversation history and contact attributes. When agents are calling out, Regal also enables them to try a different number if the first one doesn't work, as well as change the number that did work to the contact's primary number. Small touches like this make the difference in reaching customers.‍
2. Multiple customers might have the same phone number. This is especially common for healthcare brands targeting a demographic in which landline phones are still common – e.g. a husband and wife may have separate accounts with the brand, but use the same home landline number. This also happens when a parent with multiple children opens a separate account for each child, with their phone number as the contact info for all of them. In these cases, a legacy CCaaS without an Identity Resolution capability would lump all the data & activity for related accounts into a single profile that keeps getting overwritten by the latest information, leaving agents uncertain about which person a call is really for. With Regal, you can customize your identity resolution settings to deprioritize the phone number, and instead leverage some unique record id from your own internal system, allowing each person to have unique journeys and distinct conversations.
3. ‍Brands with multiple business units, like OPMs or BPOs, may need to track the same customer distinctly across each sub-brand. This is a more complex use case that traditional CCaaS providers don’t even touch. An example is a brand that manages the college application process on behalf of multiple universities, or a brand that manages recruitment for different clients. It's very likely that a student (or worker) is simultaneously applying to multiple schools (or jobs), resulting in multiple distinct accounts with the same contact info. Keeping the data and communications for one school (or job) separate from another is imperative (you wouldn't want to accidentally send an acceptance message for the wrong school). Regal enables this by allowing you to specify different subbrands, e.g. "Ohio State" vs "UMich", on each profile, and leverage that as part of the Identity Resolution process so that a call from a student to the UMich hotline will end up on the correct profile.

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The underlying tech stack required to deliver on personalization is fundamentality different from traditional CCaaS infrastructure -- it requires modern capabilities like Identity Resolution to excel.

If you’re ready to move #BeyondCCaaS and start treating millions of customers like one in a million contact us.