Unifying customer views with identity and data

In an era where customer expectations evolve faster than the systems designed to understand them, organisations find themselves confronting a silent but deeply consequential paradox: they have more customer data than ever before, yet less clarity about the customers themselves. Every digital interaction every tap, search, purchase, preference, and service request adds another layer to the customer story. But when those layers remain scattered across platforms, channels, and business units, they stop being an asset and start becoming noise.

Most enterprises aren’t short on customer data, CRM records, website behaviour, app interactions, transactions, loyalty information, call centre logs, and more. Yet many still struggle to answer simple but sharper questions: Why can’t we recognise the same customer across our own systems? Why does every team see a different version of the truth? How can we design experiences around customers when we can’t reliably identify who they are? The uncomfortable reality is that most enterprises are navigating with fractured visibility, attempting to build personalisation, loyalty, and intelligence on top of a fragmented identity foundation.

This challenge isn’t rooted in a lack of data; it’s rooted in an absence of connectedness. Disconnected identity signals lead to duplicated efforts.

Fragmented journeys create blind spots. Siloed systems distort insights. And in boardrooms everywhere, leaders are realising that without a unified, trusted view of the customer, investments in analytics, AI, personalisation, and marketing efficiency will always underdeliver.

The barrier is rarely the lack of data. It is fragmentation.

When the same person appears as five different identities across five different systems, the organisation does not have a 360-degree view. It has five partial views, each confident in its own truth. The outcomes are familiar: inconsistent experiences, repeated messaging, wasted spend, and weak measurement.
A truly unified view is not created by adding another dashboard or report. What’s missing is identity.

Why customer data remains fragmented

Customers don’t move through neat, linear journeys. They browse on the web, use apps, talk to support, visit stores, respond to offers, and return weeks later from a different device. Each touchpoint captures only a slice of the picture. Worse, each system often uses a different identifier, such as email addresses in CRM systems, cookies or device IDs in digital platforms, phone numbers in call centres, loyalty IDs in offline databases.

When these identifiers are not connected, organisations cannot reliably recognise the same person across interactions. Separate records are interpreted as separate people. That is how one customer becomes many “customers” inside the business. Data-rich organisations end up feeling blind. The signals exist. The continuity does not.

Identity resolution as the foundation of a unified customer view

Identity resolution solves this challenge by recognising, linking, and reconciling disparate identifiers into a single, persistent customer profile. 
Done well, it creates a durable reference point: one customer, one evolving profile, many signals. It also acknowledges uncertainty; some identity links are deterministic, others probabilistic and treats those differences responsibly.

This fundamentally changes the quality of decisions that follow. Personalisation becomes coherent. Messaging becomes consistent.  Measurement becomes meaningful. Identity becomes the foundation on which a unified customer view can stand.

The role of first-party data in identity-driven strategies

The environment around data and privacy is shifting rapidly. Browsers and regulators are pushing toward greater transparency and user control. Safari has long blocked third-party cookies by default, and Chrome is moving toward an approach that emphasises user choice. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act sets a high bar for consent i.e free, specific, informed, unambiguous, purpose-driven, and affirmative.

In this context, first-party data becomes the anchor. It is the data a customer voluntarily shares, with consent, in exchange for value.

When first party data is integrated with a strong identity layer, marketers gain a unified, dynamic customer view, one that strengthens with every interaction rather than collapsing the moment a cookie expires. This is what makes customer intelligence resilient.

From unified identity to actionable intelligence

A unified customer view creates value only when it is activated across the organisation. Many enterprises stop at building the “single view” but fail to make it usable. When identity and data come together effectively, businesses can deliver consistent experiences across paid, owned, and earned channels, reduce waste by eliminating redundant or irrelevant messaging, and improve attribution by connecting activity and outcomes at the individual level.

This shifts marketing from campaign-centric execution to truly customer-centric orchestration.
To do this at scale, identity must be resolved across large volumes of signals often in near real time while meeting privacy expectations and regulatory requirements.

Identity as the cornerstone of customer-centric growth

To gain a genuine customer view, don’t ask whether you have enough data. Ask whether you have a consistent way to recognise your customer across the moments that matter.

Invest in an identity foundation that is privacy-led, first-party anchored, and built for scale. Connect it to activation and measurement so your customer view becomes a living asset, not a static dashboard.

Unifying customer identity and data is no longer a technical ambition; it is a strategic imperative. It is the difference between reacting and anticipating, between generic engagement and precision relevance, between incremental value and exponential impact.

Amit Khandelwal

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Amit Khandelwal is Senior Vice President, Platform Services, at Epsilon India