Identification

What are unique identifiers

In the CXP, unique identifiers play a crucial role in organizing and managing data. A unique identifier is a distinct value assigned to each object (Company, Household etc.), which helps the CXP match all data points and interactions to the right individual. This is important for combining information from various sources, such as website visits, purchases, and customer service interactions, into a single, accurate object.

Unique identifiers, like email addresses or customer IDs, help prevent duplicate objects and ensure that data stays organized. This makes it easier for businesses to understand customer behavior and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly. With unique identifiers in place, companies can create effective segments, personalize experiences, and gain insights that drive decisions. They also help with data privacy compliance, allowing for precise data management when customers request to see or delete their information. In short, unique identifiers are essential for a CXP to provide reliable and actionable insights.

Changing unique identifiers

When you change or add a new unique identifier in your object definition and you want your historic data to reflect those changes, you need to run a re-processing action.

Common identifiers

Email as identifier

When using email as an identifier, email addresses are case insensitive

To enforce uniqueness among emails when using email as an identifier, we treat [email protected] and [email protected] as the same; these addresses represent the same person.

When you add people by email addresses or update email addresses for people, we validate the new address against the RFC 5322 standard. In general that means that your addresses are formatted first last <[email protected]> or simply [email protected].

The validation standard for email addresses is dense, but if an address is invalid, you might check for the following things:

• The address contains an @ character.

• The address “name”, the portion of the address before the @, contains letters, numbers, and does not have a leading or trailing periods.

• The domain, the portion of the address after @ contains only letters, numbers, and does not have leading or trailing - characters.

• Make sure the email property is of type email in the definition setup.

Mobile phone number as identifier

Make sure you setup your mobile phone property with type phone number and select a default region.

• Make sure your phone number values contain a region, if not the default region is taken which can lead to invalid phone numbers

• Avoid custom formatting as then the system cannot recognize/parse the number without custom scripting.

• We use the google libphonenumber library to check if a phone number is valid or not (fixPhonenumber script logic). We use this tool to check the isValidNumber outcome: https://libphonenumber.appspot.com/