Customer Identification

Customer identifiers

Defining the right customer identifiers is a critical decision at the beginning of a project. There are 2 types of identifiers:

• Hard identifier (hard ID)
• Soft identifier (soft ID)

Usually, there is 1 hard ID and multiple soft IDs.

Soft ID

Understand soft customer identifiers

A typical example of a soft ID is a cookie. One customer can have multiple soft IDs if they used multiple devices to visit your website.

Examples of soft customer identifiers

You can assign a maximum of 64 soft IDs of the same type (for example, cookies) to 1 customer. Any additional ID will be ditched with the data. For example, if you want to track a new event to a customer with 64 cookies and this event will add a new cookie, the ID that was not used for the longest time will be discarded and the new one will be added to the profile.

Hard ID

Understand hard customer identifiers

Often the hard ID is the email that the customer used to register. Every customer can have multiple hard IDs, but each hard ID can only have 1 value.

Examples of hard customer identifiers examples

Hard IDs are case sensitive. It is possible to track 2 different hard IDs where the only difference is lower and upper case letters ([email protected], [email protected]). This would in fact be just 1 customer unrecognized due to case differences. This could result in an email being sent twice to the same customer. It is a good practice to automatically change IDs to lower case.

Identify a customer

Bloomreach Engagement automatically creates a customer record for every first-time visitor to your website. At first, the customer is identified by a cookie (soft ID). The cookie is unique for every device or browser (also applies to incognito browsing). Once the customer performs an action, such as making a purchase or logging in, they are identified by a hard ID which in this case is called registered in Bloomreach Engagement. The nature of the hard ID depends on how your project is integrated. It is usually the user's email address or some internal ID your company is using.

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Note that while the hard ID used in this example is called registered , your hard ID may be different. Replace it if applicable. If you are unsure, ask your CSM, Consultant, or VDM.

How to define IDs

• Every customer profile must have at least 1 ID (hard or soft) with a filled value.
• It is not possible to delete or rename any identifier once it is set.
• It is not possible to change a soft ID into a hard ID once it is set. However, it is possible to have multiple soft IDs.
• You can make a 1-way change of identifier type from a hard ID to soft ID by a non-reversible admin operation.
• It is possible to have more than 1 hard ID identifier set in a project. For example, customer ID from e-shop and offline loyalty card number. However, it is recommended to have only 1 hard ID. For example, email or a customer ID.
• There can be more than 1 soft ID:
  • A cookie is a standard soft ID.
  • Special kinds of soft IDs can be required by some integrations.
• When you import IDs from a table in Excel, you can set some basic automatic transformations for both types of IDs by applying the following functions:
  • Trim - removes blank spaces before and after the identifier string.
  • Lowercase - changes all characters for incoming identifier to lowercase to avoid duplication. This is useful as the Bloomreach Engagement identifiers are case sensitive by default.
• Any ID must contain at least 1 alphanumeric character.
• Any ID must not contain "null" or "undefined".

Internal ID

The internal ID is an identifier that Bloomreach Engagement automatically assigns to each customer. You will not specify it as a user. However, you can see it while viewing the details of a customer. The internal ID appears in the URL.

You can also use the internal ID to retrieve the timestamp of the customer profile creation on our side. To do so, you need to decompose it according to MongoDB documentation.

It is not possible to assign an internal ID to a particular customer.