Merged Profiles causing an issue for push notifications

[akwankl]

Hi all,

This is becoming an increasingly bigger problem for our AEP instance. We've noticed that more and more profiles are getting merged together due to common ECIDs, meaning customers would login to different accounts with the same ECID browser and as a result the profiles are getting merged together.

This is making our push notification strategy more riskier day by day because we could be targeting devices that are completely not associated with the intended account we want to target. As an example, if we have a campaign that wants to remind customers to pay their bill, the customer could be getting the wrong notification due to them logging into another person's account(say parents account) and having their profiles merged together.

How can we address this in AJO?

Thanks.

[_Manoj_Kumar_]

Hello @akwankl 

My suggest would be to use make the customer Id as primary identifier (if the customer is authenticated).

Also, While sending push notification always last login is considered as activate account on that device and all the personalization would be coming from that account.

[akwankl]

Hi @_Manoj_Kumar_ ,

How do we only send push notifications to last login? My understanding is we can only send push notifications at a profile level, meaning all ECIDs under that profile. How do we only send to ECIDs that's last login to the account?

[alejovillegaslopez]

Hi @_Manoj_Kumar_ any update around @akwankl 's question? Im also getting same experience, it seems is not filtering by logged in / logged out status. Maybe in the body to send push notifications? a field to specify this? Thanks for any help! 

[_Manoj_Kumar_]

Hello @alejovillegaslopez 

It is a bit tricky for non-authenticated users. You will have to refresh the ECID for any new customer who is interacting with this app.

@akwankl  @alejovillegaslopez  Could you please explain the use case and how many customers interact with this same device? Is this kiosk or a personal device?

[alejovillegaslopez]

hello @_Manoj_Kumar_ the problem could be explained like a family that uses the same device with different accounts, we dont want to sent push notifications for people who are not the target; or even if you already are NOT logged in into the app; why should I keep receiving such type of notifications?, you know?. I tried refreshing the ECID on every new user with resetIdentities method but it does not work(not sure if the SDKs have any other solution apart of this one, if so, can you please provide some guide. Thanks!), it does not matter if you have a logged in/logged out status. We want to filter notifications by user. Any help would be appreciated  

[_Manoj_Kumar_ · Accepted solution]

Hello @alejovillegaslopez 

When the second user logs in at that time you will have to change the identifier to something unique like customer id

There is an function called syncIdentifier and you can make the customerId as primary identifier. This way profile won't be merged with ECID.

Code sample:

https://github.com/adobe/aepsdk-react-native/blob/b575cbd34cd751bfd1b06f6f60c1c96ae2dfec71/apps/AEPS...

[alejovillegaslopez]

I already tried this one but the issue persist; once guest signs off from the app the notifications keeps coming, even when we already change his/her status to logged out  

[Anuhya-Y]

@akwankl 

While there's no easy fix to completely eliminate merged profiles using the same device (ECID), there are approaches to minimize it. This would likely involve a significant overhaul of how ECID associates with other identifiers. For more information, check out the blog: https://www.credera.com/insights/how-resolve-personalization-issues-shared-devices?redirect=true&ref...

[akwankl]

Hi @Anuhya-Y, 

Would you know if this is something the product team is looking to address? I would think this would be quite a common issue across other customers too.

Thanks.

[Anuhya-Y]

@akwankl To the best of my knowledge, this isn't on the product roadmap. The approach to identifying unique customers varies between brands, and the solutions to minimize the impact of shared devices among customers depend on the other tools involved in the architecture.

[Ivan_Mironchuk]

Take a look at this page on merge policies and see if that helps at all:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-platform/profile/merge-policies/overview

cc @ShotaId 

[akwankl]

Hey @Ivan_Mironchuk,

I tried using merge policy to address this issue and I don't think it helped. I tried building a merge policy without identity stitching and at the identity level I wanted to target, and have segments configured to use that merge policy. 

The result was that the journey using these segments would refer back to the profiles using the default merge policy which has identity stitching. I think what would be super helpful is the ability to choose targeting dimensions like ACS can.

[arpan-garg]

Hi @akwankl  - We are facing the same issue and we heard Adobe is coming up with some solution for this(personalized identity graph(not sure of the name)). For now, we have raised a support ticket not to target customers who have multiple CRM ids and single ECID(meaning the profile got merged because of using same device).

Thanks,

Arpan

[alejovillegaslopez]

hey @arpan-garg maybe you have a link to this ticket that we can to review and follow up? Thanks a lot! 

[arpan-garg]

Hi @alejovillegaslopez  - Here is the content of the ticket

"Request

Hi Team, We are facing an issue when multiple customer use the same device to login to the website. Since the ECID on the device is same it is resulting in the merging of profiles of the customers.Their is an option in the backend which you can enable so that profiles that are merged using ECID namespace are not targeted at all via all channels including AJO campaigns, Journeys and personalization. Can you enable this for us.

Response

It appears that you are referring to the 'Shared device interim approach': request explicit engineering intervention to prevent those profiles from activating. The profiles will be available in the data lake and not the profile store, but none of them will be activated in any segment. To initiate the process, please provide the following: - Sandbox [All/a specific one] - Namespace (Identity symbol) that will be prevented from being merged"

Thanks,

Arpan

[akwankl]

This issue is escalating in our org and we just had an instance where a push notification was sent out to customers reminding to make their payment to completely irrelevant customers. In this case, it was even a random stitching between a customer in the East Coast and the West Coast (We are investigating why stitching like this happened, but it comes back to incorrect stitching). 

We have applied excluding >1 CRM ID immediately for our targeting, but that means ~30% reduction in our targeting pool immediately for push notification. And the number continues to go up as there is no solution to unstitch except using the data lifecycle API to delete the stitching ECID. I really hope there is a solution for this.