How To Overcome The Struggle Of Identifying Customers Online

Innovation How To Overcome The Struggle Of Identifying Customers Online Bill Bruno Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Aug 15, 2022, 10:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Bill Bruno is CEO of D4t4 Solutions .

getty Over the past few years, businesses have been forced to quickly adapt to a virtual world. As that was happening, consumers became more aware of their privacy and with whom they were willing to share personal information. Many tools used to identify habits, interests and personal information are now rendered useless and have resulted in businesses losing sight of the customer visiting their website.

Subpar technologies, the deprecation of third-party cookies, restricted data sharing and browser limitations are complicating efforts to bring information together to create a great customer experience—something consumers expect delivered at every visit. We hear so much about the importance of customer experiences, but very few of those conversations include the personalization element. Businesses struggle to find new means to identify customers.

When they are successful, they face the additional challenge of connecting those customers to other transactions or previous interactions. This can be frustrating for both the business and the consumer. As tech companies innovate new ways to solve this issue, there is a key component to help businesses identify customers and leave consumers satisfied with how their information was used.

It is nearly impossible to guess what data a business may need for future consumer identity hurdles. An immediate way to help solve identity is to cast a giant net, contextualize as much information as possible in a low-code way and comply with the rules of today’s marketplace. First-party cookies paired with the right data collection and contextualization can give businesses that net and futureproof their desire to be consumer-focused.

Not all technologies can share information across different devices and channels (such as jumping from website to mobile app) or across company-owned web addresses, which presents a massive lost opportunity to understand the customer. A business also cannot wait hours or days for all of this to happen; it must be in milliseconds because consumers do not have the patience to wait around. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event It is common for large companies to have five to seven systems that collect customer data for varied reasons, such as loyalty rewards, hotel reservations, flight reservations, car rental and excursions.

Some of those first-party datasets may be able to be brought together in-house. For example, a company may be able to connect a CRM and loyalty database without expert technology. Build versus buy has always been a consideration in the data industry, but there are a lot of pitfalls when talking about something complex like digital identity.

Data needs a single source of truth, not a fragmented tech stack of similar datasets, which often contradict each other. Tagging, data layers and privacy laws that change from state to state and country to country complicate that effort to connect siloed data, making expert technology a more feasible solution. Without identification, businesses cannot determine user pain points and will inevitably misunderstand user intentions and miss opportunities.

A positive customer experience is not possible without the ability to identify users, as businesses do not know what went wrong or how to fix it. Misunderstanding customers creates the risk of making brands look uninformed. However, if businesses do make the identity connection in their customer experience, the growth opportunities become endless.

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