My support agent didn’t have a memory problem — it was mixing up the same customer 3 different ways

Description and use

The support agent mistakenly treated the same customer as three separate entities due to differing identifiers in Slack, email, and HubSpot. Implementing a canonical customer entity with linked identities and an event log resolved the issue.

Problem

Support agent treated the same customer as three separate entities across Slack, email, and HubSpot, leading to incorrect responses.

Outcome

Agent no longer confuses the same customer across channels, improving response accuracy and reducing support errors.

Workflow

• Identify all channel identifiers for a customer (Slack user ID, email, HubSpot contact ID, Zendesk IDs).
• Create a canonical customer record with an internal ID.
• Store each channel identifier as an alias pointing to the canonical ID.
• Log every interaction as an event tied to the canonical ID.
• When responding, query the canonical record and relevant event slices instead of a full transcript.

Evidence

The agent had seen: a Slack user ID, an email address, a HubSpot contact

Source

HubSpot strongly pushes email as the primary unique identifier for contacts

Source

Zendesk has the more realistic model for support. A Zendesk user can have multiple identities: email, phone, messaging identity, SDK identity, more. It also supports external_id

Source