Striking The Right Balance Between Customer Experience And Cybersecurity

Over the last few years, Customer Experience (CX) has gone from a ‘good to have’ to a ‘must-have’. Brands that successfully deliver a seamless experience will have an upper hand and be the natural choice for customers. Security and customer experience may seem to be the oddest of couples. Customer experience is often equated with convenience and ease of use. Security, on the other hand, is often at the opposite end of the spectrum. However, with the right balance between the two, the industry can unlock an abundance of untapped opportunities.

As an industry, we have gone from believing in a siloed approach to now understanding that customers need a connected security architecture that can protect, detect, and correct. The consumers of our products aren’t necessarily focused on just having the best technology. Indeed, they want better results, but they also want to enjoy the journey between purchase, implementation and daily use. They are equally interested in conveniences like the ease of set up, seamless user interface, smooth navigation through workflows, and effective interactions with other applications and resources. Customer experience must matter at every touchpoint. Once deployed, cybersecurity solutions should add value, pre-empt threats and above all, increase the productivity of security teams.

At a time when data breaches make headlines almost every day, what could an enterprise security manager do to prevent this? One of the answers could be to provide users with a better experience. Thus, users can follow cybersecurity protocols more seamlessly with a natural integration into their work lives. Unfortunately, most executives look at cybersecurity as a necessary annoyance. Rather, they must look at it as an opportunity to enhance experiences. This may be due to complex dashboards, complicated infrastructure, delayed monitoring and analysis, and inflexible navigation. It is about delivering a secure, yet world-class experience. And businesses who do so, will see the benefits in customer loyalty and trust.

Simplicity on the frontend, complexity at the back

With the increase in complexity of cyberattacks, the solutions to prevent them continue to evolve. Leveraging advanced analytics, machine learning and AI tools, as well as real-time monitoring of threats across a wide variety of endpoints and the cloud, can be a daunting task. But the key for cybersecurity solutions to be effective is to mask this complexity in the backend and empower the security teams with solutions that are agile, easy to use and simple to implement. Businesses cannot wait for months to deploy a solution when attacks are happening right now. When solutions are simple to deploy, manage and scale, not only are they more interactive but can also be the cornerstone to great customer experience.

The view from a single window

The borders between products and services are blurring. The focus is now on solutions that provide customers with the capabilities they need in a manner that best matches their operational preparedness as well as requirements. Businesses, now, rely on monitoring and response services coupled with advanced tools and technologies to deliver comprehensive solutions. What they need is a single access control screen that includes visualization to monitor, optimize and configure policies over the entire network across thousands of locations, that can simplify management, while making security stronger. By deploying a Managed Detection Response (MDR), and Endpoint Detection Response (EDR), CISOs have a single dashboard view, avoiding the pivot to multiple screens, and allowing faster analysis thus mounting a more resilient defence.

Strengthen, accelerate, and integrate

Security teams are often grappling with anywhere from five to fifty+ different security solution providers. Unfortunately, most of these disparate solutions do not work together and need independent deployment and management. In a highly fragmented security ecosystem, most organizations have a patchwork of service platforms from various security companies. Enterprises are now rethinking how they purchase and deploy security technologies and are proactively consolidating their cybersecurity vendors. With an integrated, open platform approach, organisations can reduce risk and improve outcomes. All a CISO needs is an integrated, unified security architecture that coordinates all aspects of security. (from an endpoint to Cloud)

Customer experience is a journey, and a proactive approach to enhancing it could well be the catalyst in making a positive contribution to the cyber-customer experience. Masking the complexity of security technology with expertise and collaborative resources are key to concocting an experience your customers will use with delight. To echo the words of Clare Muscutt – “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.”

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