Identity Resolution Daily

How important is identity resolution to maintaining relationships with good customers? Ask Kmart. If they had had an identity resolution solution in place, then they likely wouldn’t have just been publicly pilloried in the Wall Street Journal. Oh, and they also lost a good customer and the friends and family members of this customer.

The whole story can be found here in The Accidental Thief, but here’s basically what happened.

WSJ reporter Laura Landro mistakenly put the wrong pair of flip flops into a box and went through the checkout line. Outside of Kmart, Ms. Landro got a tap on the shoulder from a a loss prevention professional, who asked her to come back inside the store. Assuming she could easily explain her mistake, she told her family she would be right back. Instead, in her words,

“I was led to a windowless security room in the back of the store, detained for an hour and accused of deliberately switching a more expensive item into a cheaper box. The adult flip-flops, it turned out, were $24.50, and the box had been for a child’s size nine, with a $16.50 price. My stunned protestations and explanations were summarily dismissed. My driver’s license and credit card were temporarily confiscated, I was told to expect a civil notice of a fine by mail, and finally, I was advised never to return to the store.

“Though no law enforcement or court was involved, I was effectively tried, convicted and punished for a crime I didn’t intend to commit. As for my dismay at the way I was treated, there was little I could do, other than take my future business to Wal-Mart or Target. And as I later learned from security and legal experts, the store had acted reasonably and within its rights in treating me as a criminal.”

So Ms. Landro, who had just spent $800 in the store, was treated disrespectfully over an $8 pair of shoes and now she’ll never return to Kmart — even if they hadn’t asked her to never return. Worse still, this story is in the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s more of Ms. Landro’s retelling of her apprehension:

“…while I understood [the store employee’s] job was to protect the store from loss, I was a regular customer, a professional, and an upstanding citizen, and my family had just spent hundreds of dollars in the store. Did I seem to him like someone who would cheat the store out of $8 and risk this kind of treatment?

“Unmoved, he told me that he had seen what I did, and ‘people like you come in here all the time and do this.’”

Here’s what would have happened if Kmart had been using an identity resolution solution.

Retail stores collect more data on their customers than just about any other industry. The problem is that all this data is usually spread across different systems, platforms and even geographies. With an identity resolution solution in place, the store employee would have been able to run a check through all of Kmart’s databases — both positive and negative — and he could have verified that indeed Ms. Landro was all the things she said she was.

You see, identity resolution is an operational intelligence process, typically powered by an identity resolution engine, whereby organizations can search disparate data sources with a view to understanding possible identity matches and non-obvious relationships across those sources. It analyzes all of the information relating to individuals from multiple sources of data, and then applies likelihood and probability scoring to determine which identities are a match and what, if any, linkage exists between those identities.

Identity resolution engines are typically used to uncover risk, fraud, and conflicts of interest and we cover those uses here all the time. But this solution is also a useful tool for use within customer data integration (CDI) and master data management (MDM) requirements.

For example, if Ms. Landro had no negatives in her score, then the store employee would have immediately known that instead of giving her a red flag, he should be rolling out the red carpet for her.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Retail Data, Identity Resolution, Loss Prevention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.