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Digital Identity

Build a digital identity of your customers

A lot of modern life happens online. From sharing experiences on social media to ordering dinner through an app, your customers are spending a lot of time online. This means there is a wealth of data on how your customers think and act—which you can use to help meet their expectations.

Building digital identity profiles for your customers is an important step in creating a single customer view. Digital identities help you fill your customer database with information to customize marketing, track the customer journey, and ultimately increase your sales.

What is digital identity?

Digital identity data is all of the information on a customer that’s available online. It’s a combination of facts (like a name and email address) and behaviors (like frequently visiting a certain online shop). This information helps you form insights about customers while also identifying them as individuals.

The main types of identifiers include:

Credentials

These are facts, such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, and dates of birth.

Behaviors

Online behaviors include website visits, making online purchases, and signing up for email lists.

Learn how creating a digital identity can help your business.

Uses for digital identity

For consumers, digital identity is mainly about security and preventing identity theft. For businesses, however, a customer’s digital identity can be used both for security and to get more out of customer data.

  • Verifying customers: Your business can set up unique identifiers to help verify that an online customer is who they claim to be. Digital identity verification might use phone number validation or email address verification to prevent fraudulent transactions, such as online purchases or logins.
  • Creating a single view of a customer: Data from a customer’s online identity can also help you create single views of your customer data. Digital identifiers help you fill in the gaps in your customer data by verifying existing information and answering unknowns. For example, if you have a customer’s email address and postal address, information available in online databases can help you find their phone number through services like phone append.

Expand customer loyalty

The more accurate information you have on your customers, the more you can personalize their journey. Personalized messages and ads help give your customers a better customer experience. They’ll be more likely to go back to your brand and recommend it to friends and family.

Improve collaboration

As you use digital identities to create unified views of your customers, you’re also cutting out data silos. Linking existing digital data together means teams will have access to the same information—in the same format. This makes it easier for departments to work together, compare notes, and draw insights.

Grow business revenue

When you know how your customer behaves online, you have a better idea of what will encourage them to make a purchase. Digital identity data helps you decide how to reach individual customers for a better chance of making a sale.

Creating clean digital identity data

Digital identity services help you get more information on the online identity of your customers. However, customer information changes often, and you never know if something added online is accurate. After building identities for your customers, data quality management helps you clean up unverified data and keep it accurate as your customers’ lives change.

At Experian, our data experts know how important it is to have a single, complete view of customers. We also know that inaccurate data can cause more harm than good. Learn more about improving your data quality by contacting Experian’s data experts today.

 

Contact our team of data quality experts today to get started