Why is my identity event not changing my visitor into a customer in Sitecore CDP/Sitecore Personalise?

Question

When a guest logins in I want their guest profile in Sitecore CDP to move from visitor to customer and have the profile merged with any existing matching profile.

Answer 1

Firstly, ensure you are sending identity events are described in the following documentation: https://doc.sitecore.com/cdp/en/developers/sitecore-customer-data-platform--data-model-2-1/send-an-identity-event-to-sitecore-cdp.html

If the Identity event is still not changing your visitor into a customer this is likely due to the identity rules in the tenant. If you are not sending the required identifier in the identity event, the identity event will not change the visitor into a customer.

Identity Rules

When setting up a new tenant, one of the required pieces of configuration are the identity rules. The Identity rules determine how guest profiles are merged together using a deterministic matching.

When a person interacts with your brand, the CDP compares the person to all Guest Profiles using an identifier (e.g. an email, a customer ID, a loyalty number, a phone number, etc). The identifier that is used to merge customer profiles is setup in the identity rules. Organisations can also have multiple hierarchical identity rules.

To see the identity rules that have been configured in your tenant you can go to System Settings and then Company Information. Using debug mode open the orange cog on the right hand side of the page beside the save button. In a section identityIndexConfigurations the identifiers being used or identity resolution are defined. At least one of the identifiers are defined in this section need to be included in the identity event.

Example If the identity rules in Company Information are defined as follows:

"identityIndexConfigurations": [
    {
      "name": "customerID",
      "fields": [
        "identifiers.customerID "
      ]
    }
  ]

Then an identity event with the following structure needs to be sent:

{
    "channel": "WEB",
    "type": "IDENTITY",
    "language": "EN",
    "currency": "EUR",
    "page": "home page",
    "pos": "retailsite123.com",
    "browser_id": "56860bff-94ba-4d84-aa37-2b5a83d5411b",
    "identifiers": [
        {
            "provider": "customerID",
            "id": "abc123"
        }
    ]
}

Please note that if you are using the Partner Sandbox, you may not have access to the Company Information tab. In Partner Sandbox the identity rules are using email, therefore the field ‘email’ needs to be sent in the identity event.