Unleashing the Power of Identity Resolution for Modern Dealerships

Delivering a personalized customer experience is crucial for automotive dealership success, and that begins with understanding your customers on a personal level. It’s not about becoming their bestie; it’s about how you access and leverage a comprehensive view of their entire shopper journey with your dealership. 

Many dealerships struggle with fragmented customer data, often resulting in multiple or incomplete profiles for the same individual. Each of these profiles may lack critical information like contact details, purchase history, vehicles of interest, and more.  Identity resolution technology solves this problem for dealerships by unifying and cleaning these disparate profiles into a single, comprehensive customer profile. 

Moving from fragmented data to a 360-degree view of each shopper can profoundly transform every interaction with your dealership. With a unified profile, you can effectively track their website activities, optimize your marketing by eliminating duplicate outreach efforts, and tailor your engagements based on the individual’s most recent behaviors to offer them the best possible customer experience.  

What is Identity Resolution?

Let’s say your dealership has four profiles for Andrew Tucker across your various data sources. One profile is five years old but has been inactive for four, in another he entered his contact information via your website’s chatbot, in another one he made a purchase three years ago, and the fourth profile is a new lead from a Google Ad that came in last week. In theory, a team member could go through each of these profiles, check the contact information and any existing customer data, and try to determine which profiles belong to the same Andrew Tucker, manually merging their histories. It’s hardly the best use of anyone’s time, and its accuracy might be questionable. For instance, if Andrew has two different email addresses, it doesn’t necessarily warrant two separate profiles for each email. Furthermore, what if there’s a fifth profile out there representing his research on your website, that never results in  a lead—could that be another Andrew?

This is why identity resolution technology is so critical for retail automotive. It eliminates the manual task of identifying duplicate customer profiles among the many thousands that each dealer manages, allowing AI to complete the task infinitely faster and more accurately. This technology consolidates all of a dealer’s disparate customer data from various sources to identify duplicate profiles and merge them into one comprehensive 360-degree profile. This unified profile contains all the relevant data on that individual, presenting a clean and cohesive narrative of the shopper’s history.

Why Identity Resolution is Integral to a CDP

Identity resolution technology works hand-in-hand with a Customer Data Platform (CDP). The CDP serves as the central hub for all of your dealership’s customer data, incorporating information from your DMS, CRM, website analytics, call tracking, and more. Only within a CDP can full identity resolution occur, and only with identity resolution can a CDP work to the best of its ability.

Unified Customer View

Identity resolution is essential for creating complete and accurate customer profiles, which serve as the backbone of any robust CDP. Customers frequently engage with dealerships through various touchpoints, and identity resolution technology merges these disparate data sources to ensure that a single, unified profile represents each customer. To fully assess customer journeys and gain insights into individual behaviors, as well as the overall customer base, your dealership’s CDP requires a 360-degree view of each customer profile. This comprehensive view enables your team to understand not only customers’ interests but also their past interactions, preferences, and potential future needs.

Enhance Marketing and Sales

Integrating identity resolution technology into a CDP improves audience segmentation, allowing for the building of specific lists for hyper-targeted marketing efforts. Without precise knowledge of which customers are interested in particular vehicles or financing options, it becomes impossible to target them accurately. Additionally, understanding each customer at a deeper level enables your sales team to personalize every interaction. By making marketing and sales activities more targeted and relevant, your dealership can avoid wasting time and budget on irrelevant shoppers and ensure that individuals receive information or offers most likely to resonate with them.

Scalability and Future-Proofing

As your CDP data sources and the volume of dealership data continue to grow, analyzing and interpreting this information can become increasingly complex, especially since it is constantly updated. Leveraging identity resolution technology helps maintain the cleanliness of your CDP data, regardless of how much new customer information is generated daily. This clean data allows embedded AI technologies to consistently provide deep insights into all of your dealership’s shoppers, ensuring that you stay ahead in understanding customer needs and preferences.

Identity Resolution in Action at a Dealership

Let’s explore a few examples of identity resolution to gain better insights into how the technology can benefit your dealership.

Example 1: Enhanced Lead Management & Personalization

Scenario: Your CRM contains numerous customers who have interacted with your dealership through multiple touchpoints, resulting in many duplicated leads. You are now faced with hundreds of duplicate profiles.

Solution: Identity resolution technology utilizes data such as names and contact details to identify which profiles belong to the same person. It merges these duplicates into a single entity, creating a clean, unified view of all interactions and relevant information about the shopper.

Outcome: The duplicated profiles are eliminated, meaning those customers will no longer receive repeat or irrelevant communications. Even if there are multiple email addresses associated with a shopper, the CDP will ensure that only one is used for correspondence. With a clearer understanding of each individual, you can personalize every text or email they receive from your dealership, enhancing their customer experience and ultimately increasing conversion rates.

Example 2: Optimized Marketing Campaigns

Scenario: You want to shift your email marketing strategy from broad campaigns with general content to hyper-specific content for targeted audiences.

Solution: With merged customer data in your CDP, you can achieve more precise audience segmentation. After integrating identity resolution technology, you can easily create hyper-specific audience lists using the accessible, most recent shopper data to ensure your campaigns will hit the mark.

Outcome: In just seconds, you can build a new audience. You can target a broad group, such as all website visitors in the past three months, or narrow it down to specific criteria like VDP visitors with leases ending in the next six months and have clicked on recent emails. This data, pulled across multiple data sources, requires both identity resolution technology and the integrations and audience building capabilities provided by the CDP to enhance your targeting efforts, leading to increased engagement.

Example 3: Streamline Operations & Enhance Analytics

Scenario: You’re looking for ways to maximize your budget but aren’t sure which existing sales and marketing activities are generating the most leads and revenue.

Solution: By utilizing identity resolution technology to create clear 360-degree views of every customer at your dealership, you gain valuable insights that enhance your ability to make informed operational and strategic decisions based on your dealership’s data.

Outcome: By gaining a comprehensive understanding of which VDPs are receiving repeat views and which are not attracting returning visitors, you can pinpoint where the issues reside and allocate your marketing and sales resources more effectively. This data-driven strategy will help you maximize your dealership’s potential.

Implementing Identity Resolution in Your Dealership

Assessing Your Current Data Landscape

The first step in integrating identity resolution technology at your dealership is to gain a comprehensive understanding of your current data landscape. Conducting a dealer data audit of your existing data silos and integrations will provide clarity on the sources of your data and the connections required for effective identity resolution. This customer data analysis will also help you identify common pain points within your existing data management system(s), which can be addressed with the new identity resolution technology.

Data Collection & Integration
Start by gathering data from all available sources, including online forms, CRM systems, social media, and more. Take advantage of your Customer Data Platform’s APIs and integration capabilities to streamline the process, making the connection between these disparate data sources as automated as possible. 

Ongoing Data Maintenance & Analytics
To ensure the constant integrity of your customer profiles, establish continuous data hygiene processes that automatically run around the clock, keeping every profile accurate, up-to-date, and unified. Regularly cleansing and validating your data will prevent errors and discrepancies from piling up over time. Utilize your CDP’s analytics tools to monitor your customer data and performance closely, allowing you to identify trends and insights, enabling you to refine your customer data strategies as needed.

Best Practices & Considerations
When implementing identity resolution technology at your dealership, it’s crucial to prioritize data governance to ensure that your customer information is secure, compliant, and managed effectively. Establish clear policies and procedures that dictate how data is collected, stored, and accessed, safeguarding against potential breaches or misuse. Regular audits should also be conducted to assess the integrity and accuracy of your data, identifying any areas for improvement or cleanup. Additionally, consider the scalability of your solutions; as your dealership grows, your data management systems should be able to accommodate increasing volumes of data without compromising performance or security.

Fullpath’s Identity Resolution for Dealers

Embracing identity resolution technology is pivotal for dealerships aiming to achieve a holistic understanding of their customers. By consolidating fragmented data into a unified customer view, dealerships can create comprehensive profiles that reflect each shopper’s complete journey. This 360-degree perspective not only enhances marketing performance by enabling precise audience segmentation and hyper-targeted campaigns but also fosters personalized interactions, ultimately driving higher conversion rates.

Moreover, identity resolution streamlines operations by minimizing duplicate profiles, reducing communication errors, and providing valuable insights into customer behaviors. As a result, dealerships can allocate resources more effectively, optimize their marketing strategies, and make data-driven decisions that propel growth. By integrating identity resolution into your Customer Data Platform, you can transform your data landscape, ensuring that your dealership remains agile and responsive to customer needs while maximizing operational efficiency.

Fullpath’s Customer Data Platform leverages advanced identity resolution technology to tackle common data challenges in dealerships. By unifying fragmented customer data from various sources, it creates accurate and comprehensive customer profiles, eliminating duplicates and enabling personalized experiences. Fullpath’s API and integration capabilities facilitate real-time data synchronization across channels, ensuring that customer interactions are automatically updated within the CDP. Fullpath’s AI-powered platform effortlessly scales to accommodate more profiles and data sources, maintaining high performance and delivering actionable insights.

Don’t miss the opportunity to transform your dealership’s data strategy, and  elevate your marketing efforts and operational efficiency. Schedule a personalized demo today and discover how Fullpath can transform your dealership’s approach to data management and customer engagement.