Forum Discussion
externalID
hello
3 Replies
Hi Braze Community,
I'm currently learning how to set up Braze for our brand and have a question:
Our CRM uses a customer_loyalty_id to identify loyalty members. Should we map this directly to Braze's external_id, or is it better to keep the app-generated user ID as the external_id and store the customer_loyalty_id as a custom attribute?
I appreciate any insights or experiences you can share on this topic!
Best regards,
HernandoHello HernandoRen Do you have any customers in CRM that are not loyalty members and you want them to ingest in Braze?
I would use a primary user identifier (something unique to identify a customer liek customer_id) to populate external_id. If you are not sure then you can use user_alias to add secondary identifiersYou can read more about these here: https://www.braze.com/docs/user_guide/data/user_data_collection/best_practices/#step-1-check-if-the-user-exists
https://www.braze.com/docs/api/objects_filters/aliases_to_identify
Great question! Building on the earlier comment: the external_id in Braze should be a unique identifier that represents an individual person across your systems. If your customer_loyalty_id only applies to loyalty members—and not to every customer or user—it’s better to keep that as a custom attribute on the user profile.
That way, you can still identify and target loyalty members, without using it as the main ID that Braze relies on to recognize users. Your external_id should be something consistent and universal for every user, not just a subset like loyalty members.
