Enable Real-Time Customer Profiles

Last update: February 14, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Developer

In this lesson, you will enable your schemas and datasets for Real-Time Customer Profile.

Okay, I lied when I said that the datasets lesson was the shortest lesson in this tutorial—this one should take even less time! Literally all you are going to do is flip a bunch of toggles. But what happens when you flip these toggles is really important so I wanted to dedicate a whole page to it.

With Real-Time Customer Profile, you can see a holistic view of each individual customer that combines data from multiple channels, including online, offline, CRM, and third-party data. Profile allows you to consolidate your disparate customer data into a unified view offering an actionable, timestamped account of every customer interaction.

As amazing as all that sounds, you don’t need to activate all of your data for profile. In fact, you should only enable the data you need for activation use cases. Enable data that you want to use for marketing use cases, call center integrations, and so on, where you need fast access to a robust customer profile. If you are uploading data only for analysis, it probably shouldn’t be enabled for profile.

There are important guardrails for Real-Time Customer Profile data which you should review when deciding which of your own data you should enable for profile.

Data Architects will need to enable Real-Time Customer Profile outside of this tutorial.

Before you begin the exercises, watch this short video to learn more about Real-Time Customer Profile:

video poster

Permissions required

In the Configure Permissions lesson, you set up all the access controls required to complete this lesson.

Enable schemas for Real-Time Customer Profile using Platform user interface

Let’s start with the simple task of enabling a schema:

  1. In the Platform user interface, open the Luma Loyalty Schema

  2. In Schema Properties, toggle the Profile switch

  3. In the confirmation modal, press the Enable button to confirm

  4. Select the Save button to save your changes

    IMPORTANT
    Once a schema is enabled for Profile, it cannot be disabled or deleted. Also, fields cannot be removed from the schema after this point. These implications are important to keep in mind later on when you are working with your own data in your Production environment. You should be using a development sandbox in this tutorial, which can be deleted at any time.
    In the controlled environment of this tutorial, you will enable your schemas and datasets for profile, before ingesting any data. When working with your own data, we recommend you do things in the following order:
    1. First, ingest some data into your datasets.
    2. Address any issues that arise during the data ingestion process (for example, data validation or mapping issues).
    3. Enable your datasets and schemas for Profile
    4. Reingest the data

    Profile Toggle

Easy right? Repeat the steps above for these other schema:

  1. Luma Product Catalog Schema
  2. Luma Offline Purchase Events Schema
  3. Luma Web Events Schema (on the confirmation modal, check the box “Data for this schema will contain a primary identity in the identityMap field.”)