Configure identity rules

This topic describes how to configure the identity rules for your organization's tenant.

Team members with an Organization Admin or Organization Owner role in Sitecore Cloud Portal can configure identity rules.

You can do this after your organization's tenant is created and before you start sending events to Sitecore Personalize. We recommend you familiarize yourself with identity resolution before reading this topic.

To configure your organization's identity rules:

On the navigation menu, click > Identity rules.
Click Add Rule.

Warning

If you want to add more than one identity rule, you must add them in the order you want them prioritized, starting with the identity rule with the highest priority. If you want to change the priority of the identity rules, you must delete the identity rules and add them again in order of priority.
On the Add Identity Rule screen, complete the following fields and click Save:
- Rule name - enter the name of the identity rule.
- Identifier provider - enter the required provider attribute that Sitecore Personalize uses to identify the guest. For example, CRM_ID. This must be the same name as the provider attribute in the IDENTITY event that your organization sends to Sitecore Personalize. If it is not the same, Sitecore Personalize can not successfully evaluate identity rules. To review examples, see Examples of rules using unique identifiers.
To add additional identity rules, click Add Rule. You can enter up to five identity rules. Most organizations use one or two identity rules.

In the following image, the organization uses two identity rules:
- CRM number - with CRM_ID as the identifier.provider.
- Loyalty number - with loyalty_ID as the identifier.provider.
Using this same example, your organization must send an IDENTITY event that contains a value for either the CRM_ID or loyalty_ID attributes, for Sitecore Personalize to identify a guest. If Sitecore Personalize does not find a match with the first listed identity rule, it evaluates the next, and so on.

If a guest is matched, Sitecore Personalize assigns a guest type of customer. If no guests are matched, assigns or retains a guest type of visitor.

The following IDENTITY event meets the required identity rules because it contains at least one of the required provider attributes, CRM_ID or loyalty_ID:
RequestResponse
```
{
   "channel":"WEB",
   "type":"IDENTITY",
   "language":"EN",
   "currency":"EUR",
   "page":"home page",
   "pos":"myretailsite.com",
   "browser_id":"56860bff-94ba-4d84-aa37-2b5a83d5411b",
   "identifiers":[
      {
         "provider":"CRM_ID",
         "id":"123456"
      },
      {
         "provider":"loyalty_ID",
         "id":"xni8934y77"
      }
   ]
}
```
Important

The new identity rule(s) take a few minutes to become effective. You must wait until then to update the IDENTITY event with the new attribute and start sending it to Sitecore Personalize. Sitecore Personalize cannot identify the guest using the new rule until a few minutes have passed.

If you start sending updated IDENTITY events to Sitecore Personalize before the new identity rule(s) become effective, Sitecore Personalize, existing guest profiles won't be correctly updated or matched to the new identity rules, potentially resulting in incomplete or incorrect data alignment and duplicate guest profiles. If this happens, you must contact Sitecore Support to perform manual reindexing to ensure all guest profiles are updated to include the new attribute and align with the current indexing rules.
Update the IDENTITY event to ensure that it contains the attribute(s) used in the updated identity rule(s).

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