Recognizing your customers to activate personalized and sustainable journeys

Building close relationships is a top priority for retailers. In mature markets where offerings are increasingly similar, providing a personalized experience is a key differentiator. It fosters lasting brand loyalty and meets a clear consumer expectation: to be recognized, reassured, and valued, across every brand touchpoint.

The numbers speak for themselves: 40% of consumers say they would have a more pleasant shopping experience if they were automatically identified as existing customers when visiting a site (Reach Five-Sapio study). Conversely, having to re-identify themselves at every interaction creates friction and is a major pain point.

Having a unified view of customer data in a landscape where interaction channels and devices are multiplying is a significant challenge for retailers, but it is also the essential prerequisite for delivering a seamless omnichannel experience.

“A company-wide commitment to customer personalization inevitably requires a data-centric approach to truly understand your customers, based on reliable, secure, and up-to-date data.” Jean-Christophe Bouvenet, Head of Product, Purse

To achieve this, it is essential to establish the right foundations:

• understanding the role of customer identity in the personalization chain,
• knowing how to build this unified view,
• and making it the cornerstone of a trusted customer relationship.

That is what we will explore in this article.

Why customer identity recognition is a prerequisite for personalization

Personalizing the customer experience starts with knowing who you are talking to. Before offering relevant recommendations, targeted offers, or tailored content, you must be able to recognize the customer, connect their interactions, and access their up-to-date preferences and consents. Without this recognition, personalization remains generic: it addresses segments, not individuals.

As Samuel Vandamme, E-commerce and Digital Director at Micromania, puts it: "People like to be recognized, but they don't like to have to identify themselves." This is the core challenge: providing seamless recognition without forcing the customer to repeat who they are at every interaction.

However, in most organizations, customer knowledge is scattered across multiple systems. The CRM manages the commercial relationship. The CDP (Customer Data Platform) aggregates behavioral data. The loyalty program maintains its own database. Sometimes, a Single Customer View (SCV) attempts to reconcile it all. Each of these tools adds value, but none can function at its full potential if the data feeding it is unreliable or not linked to the correct customer.

This is where CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) comes in. Its role is to sit upstream of all these repositories. CIAM captures the customer's identity at the very moment of interaction, in real time. It verifies authentication, records consents, and then pushes qualified data to the CRM, CDP, or loyalty program via APIs or webhooks. In return, these systems associate a unique identifier with the reconciled profile.

This complementarity is essential: CIAM operates in real time, at the point of customer contact, while other repositories use data offline for segmentation, campaign activation, or reporting. It is this synergy that allows for the construction of the unified customer view upon which all personalization efforts rely.

CIAM is an identity solution, not a marketing one. But it is what makes marketing tools more powerful and reliable.

When customer identity is fragmented: the cost of silos

What happens when customer identity is fragmented? A retailer might have one customer database for in-store, another for the web, and a third for the loyalty program. Each touchpoint manages authentication independently, with no connection between profiles. Customers exist multiple times within the information system, with incomplete data and consents that are not synchronized across channels.

This is, for example, the situation Micromania identified before its 2024 convergence project. In-store customers, who held the Mégacarte loyalty card, did not all have a web account. Web customers did not all have a Mégacarte. And in-store customers had no control over their personal data. Two isolated worlds, with over 3 million in-store accounts disconnected from the digital environment. E.Leclerc faced a similar issue: with one customer account per consumption category, consents were localized to a single area, making cross-channel offer management highly complex.

What are the repercussions of this fragmentation?

For the customer:

• An inconsistent journey from one channel to another
• Friction during authentication and the need to re-enter information, leading to dissatisfaction and frustration
• The inability to access their loyalty program online

For the brand:

• Partial customer knowledge that limits the ability to personalize campaigns
• Difficulty in turning customer data into actionable insights (tailored promotions, product highlights based on purchase history, etc.)
• Increased pressure on customer service for low-value tasks (password resets, locked accounts, merging duplicate accounts).
• Risks related to GDPR compliance when consents are not consolidated

These situations illustrate a common challenge: as long as identities remain siloed, personalization can only rely on a partial view of the customer. To move past this, you must build a unified identity.

Building a unified customer identity with CIAM

Reconciling profiles: from duplication to uniqueness

When a customer creates a new account, the challenge is to analyze in real time whether they are already registered in the database, regardless of their login identifier, by relying on matching keys such as email, phone number, or an external ID (loyalty or subscriber number). The goal: avoid creating any duplicates and, if necessary, link the new interaction to the existing profile.

Two approaches coexist:

• The deterministic approach relies on a single verifiable common key (for example, a confirmed email) to establish with certainty that two profiles belong to the same person.
• The probabilistic approach combines several factors that, together, make a match highly likely without absolute certainty.

In both cases, security is built into the process: in the event of a duplicate, the reconciliation must be verified by a human. Before merging two profiles, the customer receives a validation link via email or a code via SMS. Merged accounts retain each piece of information separately, creating a unique and complete profile without any data loss.

Enriching progressively without being intrusive: progressive profiling

The goal of progressive profiling is twofold: to streamline the initial journey while building a lasting relationship with the customer. The principle is based on a simple question: how can you gain rich customer insights while maintaining a seamless experience?

The recommendation is to ask for as little as possible at the start and to request information only when the user understands the need for it. A delivery address? It makes sense at the time of purchase, not at registration. A date of birth? When the customer joins the loyalty program to receive a personalized offer. A phone number? When they activate SMS order tracking.

This approach is also aligned with the data minimization principle mandated by the GDPR (Article 5.1.c): collect only data that is adequate, relevant, and limited to what is necessary for the intended purpose. The CNIL recommends thinking ahead about the utility of each piece of data collected and avoiding adding superfluous fields to forms (learn more on the CNIL website).

Internally, the difficulty is real: every team (marketing, CRM, loyalty, e-commerce) has its own data needs. Progressive profiling forces you to make trade-offs and prioritize, placing the customer at the center of the thinking process rather than the needs of individual departments.

Consumers are receptive to this: 41% say they are willing to share their consumption preferences in exchange for rewards like discount coupons or loyalty points (ReachFive-Sapio study). The logic is one of give-and-take: the customer shares their data because they see a benefit, and the brand enriches its knowledge over time, without friction and in compliance with the regulatory framework.

Connecting identity to marketing and data tools

CIAM does not store customer data for its own sake. Its value lies in its ability to feed qualified and consented data into other components of the information system.

The architecture is simple in principle. The CIAM captures the customer's interaction and data during identification. It is the primary gateway. It then pushes this data to the CRM, CDP, or MDM via APIs or webhooks (events triggered automatically by each customer action). In return, these repositories associate a unique identifier with the profile. The CIAM functions as the real-time repository (with the associated availability and performance requirements), while other systems use the data for offline segmentation, activation, and reporting.

This complementarity provides companies with the highly sought-after 360° customer view: a qualified, continuously updated identity that every tool can leverage to personalize the experience.

From recognition to personalization: feedback from our clients ADEO (Leroy Merlin) and Boulanger

Once a unified customer identity is in place, what are the possible applications? Here are two examples from brands that have implemented this approach.

Boulanger: personalized advice through omnichannel identity

"Our vision: to ensure our customers are known and recognized with certainty across all channels in every interaction with Boulanger and its ecosystem." Jérémie Massebiau, Data Project Manager, Boulanger

The challenge: In-store customers and web customers existed in separate worlds. Store staff did not have access to online purchase history, and long-standing in-store customers did not have online accounts.

The solution: Deployment of CIAM across all front-ends with unique identifier verification during account creation, allowing for the reconciliation of physical and digital identities.

The result: Store staff can access full purchase history to provide personalized advice. Long-standing in-store customers receive an invitation to activate their digital space (invoices, customer service, communication preferences).

Next step : personalize the browsing and shopping experience by leveraging aggregated customer insights.

Adeo (Leroy Merlin): from identification to marketing activation

"To collect this data, we need to be able to identify every visitor, which is why we implemented a CIAM with Purse." Julien Chenaf, Chief Transformation Officer Customer, Marketing and Digital Technology, Groupe Adeo

The challenge: On an international scale, the group needed to recognize every customer, regardless of the touchpoint, to power ultra-personalized marketing campaigns.

The solution: The CIAM identifies and authenticates the customer in real time. Data collected through interactions (purchases, loyalty program, customer service inquiries) is then transmitted to marketing tools to trigger personalized campaigns: targeted emails, website navigation personalization, and product recommendations.

The result: First-party data collected through interactions (loyalty programs, customer service exchanges) is fed into the CDP and activated automatically. This creates a continuously enriched customer profile and enables personalization ranging from the simple (recognizing a customer by their first name upon arrival) to recommendations tailored to their history and preferences.

Sustainable personalization that benefits everyone

In this context, the concept of sustainability—a cornerstone of any business strategy—encompasses several key notions:

Data sustainability. With the end of third-party cookies, the probabilistic data that once underpinned much of marketing targeting is gradually disappearing. First-party data (collected directly from the customer) and zero-party data (shared intentionally by the customer) are the only ones that stand the test of time. Progressive profiling, supported by a unified identity, is the mechanism that allows you to build this lasting foundation, interaction by interaction.

Relationship sustainability. A customer who is recognized at every touchpoint develops a sense of trust in the brand: they feel valued and reassured about the security of their personal data. Mechanisms like long-lived sessions or magic links save them from having to re-identify themselves during every visit, which facilitates return visits and encourages repeat business. And when consent management is directly linked to the customer's identity (rather than scattered across disconnected systems), the brand gains a powerful lever to re-engage them effectively and legitimately, without the risk of unwanted solicitation. Recognition, reassurance, and controlled consent form a virtuous cycle that drives loyalty.

Regulatory sustainability. Personalization based on explicit, centrally managed, and cross-channel synchronized consent meets regulatory requirements (GDPR, ePrivacy). Consent cannot be separated from customer identity management: when both reside in the same system, desynchronization is impossible, allowing the company to approach audits with confidence.

Conclusion:

Unified customer identity is not just a technical project for the IT department. It is the foundation upon which any personalization strategy rests and the guarantor of its longevity. The challenge for companies is to strike the right balance between simple initial customer recognition and capturing enough information to build a loyal, stable, and rich relationship over time.

To assess where your organization stands, three questions can serve as a starting point. How many customer databases coexist in your information system? Is an in-store customer automatically recognized when they log in online, and vice versa? Is your consent data synchronized across all channels?

Purse Identity has been helping retail, leisure, and sports brands address these challenges since 2015. Its CIAM platform natively integrates the link between customer identity and consent, offers mechanisms designed for repeat business (long-lived sessions, magic links), and homogenizes the experience between physical stores and digital channels. With expertise in international use cases, Purse helps its clients streamline the journey from check-in to check-out.

Would you like to audit your customer identity management and identify areas for improvement? [Contact our team to discuss it.]

Key takeaways:

What is a unified customer identity? A single profile that aggregates all interactions from the same customer (web, store, app, customer support) around a reconciled identifier, regardless of the connection channel, the identifier used, or the device.

Why is a unified customer identity essential for personalization? Without a unified identity, marketing tools (CRM, CDP, marketing automation) rely on fragmented and incomplete data. Personalization remains generic, targeting segments rather than individuals.

What is the role of CIAM in this process? CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) handles account creation, authentication, and consent. Positioned upstream from other systems, it captures identity in real time and feeds qualified, consented data into your repositories (CRM, CDP, Single Customer View).

What is progressive profiling? An approach that involves collecting the minimum amount of information at registration, then enriching the profile over the course of interactions, at the moment the customer understands its value. This aligns with the GDPR principle of data minimization.

What makes a personalization strategy sustainable? Three pillars: long-term first-party data (vs. third-party cookies), a relationship of trust based on recognition and consent management, and regulatory compliance by design.