Customer data is messy. People move. They remarry. They log into sites and mobile apps with different email addresses and phone numbers across their household. The list goes on. So, if you want to email a customer, which email address should you send it to? And if you’re using AI agents for 1:1 marketing at scale, how will those agents know the right records to use for millions of customers?
Put simply, you can’t market to your customers if you don’t know who they are: you need a trusted record of each customer that you and your AI agents can learn from and act on.
Today, we’re launching Golden Record, our latest investment in Identity Resolution. Golden Record builds a clean, simple, and trusted customer profile for marketers and AI agents to use that always has the correct email address, phone number, and any other identifiers you collect.
This is an enhancement to our core Identity Resolution product that resolves and stitches together all of the email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifiers associated with your users. Golden Record goes a step further by letting you choose the final “approved” identifier for each field using both simple and advanced survivorship logic. Our Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP) and AI Decisioning both operate directly from this profile, enabling marketers to build audiences and journeys or deploy agents immediately with this canonical, source-of-truth data.
In the rest of this blog, we’ll explore what makes Golden Record different from other CDPs’ offerings and show how it actually works.
Why most CDPs get identity resolution and survivorship wrong
Most Customer Data Platforms struggle with identity resolution and survivorship for two main reasons: first, they rely on incomplete data and second, they are too opaque and inflexible to be fully trusted.
To really be valuable, customer profiles need to be comprehensive, but unfortunately most CDPs have a very limited view of the data available in an enterprise. If a CDP requires you to copy data into it, then it will always be limited in what it can see and therefore limited in the quality of its identity resolution. For example, a traditional CDP will merge clickstream events that they collect on websites but miss any in-store or ecommerce transactions stored in a data warehouse. In contrast, Hightouch’s Identity Resolution can access all customer data and transactions because it operates directly within the data warehouse.
The other challenge of traditional CDP identity resolution is limited configurability or visibility. This creates a one-dimensional and black-box experience for CDP users.
Why is transparency and configurability so important? Imagine a customer has interacted with a brand using multiple different email addresses, but when marketing to the customer, the brand wants to only message the primary or most recently used email address to avoid a spammy experience. With survivorship, you can define logic by selecting the most recently or frequently used email. You can even use more complex logic, such as prioritizing specific data sources you deem more trustworthy. Most CDPs lack configurability or default to a single inflexible rule, such as the “most recent” identifier.
We've written a longer blog here if you’re interested in other CDP shortcomings in identity resolution beyond survivorship.
How Golden Record works
To use the Golden Record feature, you must first set up an identity graph in Hightouch’s Identity Resolution product (docs). This will give you a list of identifiers associated with every user.
Within the Golden Record tab of Identity Resolution, you define survivorship rules for any column, such as email address. Two simple options would be to keep the most recent email address or the most frequent email address. As you can see in the example below, you can create multiple “types” of each identifier to keep—you could keep one column for “most frequent email” and another one for “most recent email.”
Golden Record lets you define survivorship rules for any identifier. In this example, we chose the “most frequent” email associated with each customer.
You can also set up far more complex and customized logic for which identifiers to keep. For example, you can stack-rank the trustworthiness of different sources of each identifier and toggle between choosing the “most recent” or “most frequent” identifier from each source.
You can define custom logic to determine which identifiers you keep.
Ultimately, Golden Record saves its outputs directly into a table in your data warehouse, which you can use for any of your business operations. It also automatically exports into the schema builder in Hightouch, which means that marketers can immediately build audiences and journeys or deploy agents using their Golden Record customer profile.
Golden Record builds a Schema in Hightouch. Marketers can immediately build audiences and journeys using these customer profiles.
You can learn more about setting up Golden Record profiles in our documentation.
Closing thoughts
Golden Record creates trusted profiles that power all of your marketing and AI initiatives. Unifying customer profiles directly in your source-of-truth data warehouse has never been easier: contact our solutions team to try it for yourself.
