How Customer Identity will be key to Enterprise Digital Success

By Rakesh Soni, Co-founder/CEO, LoginRadius

When it comes to IT (Information Technology), the last decade has witnessed numerous developments, trends and hypes. And the newest hype and current buzz word today is ‘digital transformation’; used to define anything and everything. As proclaimed by most stakeholders, digital transformation is crucial for business growth and competitive advantage. Especially if it’s about customers, because seamless digital experiences are a major customer expectation today. New and disruptive players like Uber, Amazon etc. have set standards high for all enterprises that cater to new age customers.

Digital transformation has many manifestations but the simplest way to look at it would be – as a measure that eliminates the need for manual processes and helps present the best customer experience possible. Every company wants to build the best customer relations possible. Enter Identity & Access Management or IAM. Where classic IAM mainly addressed employees and business customers, Customer-IAM (or: CIAM) is the future of digital customer experiences.

Rakesh Soni, Co-founder/CEO, LoginRadius

Enabling Digital Experiences with CIAM

Ease of access to any service or application is a crucial element of digital transformation. For any enterprise, a central authentication mechanism is an important step to better understand their customers, allowing them to offer better services. With the right Customer IAM tooling, enterprises can onboard rich functionality and have standardised processes like registration, password reset, data management easily integrated into their core infrastructure. Especially with new privacy regulations like GDPR, adding significant data and consumer privacy complexity to internal systems, Customer IAM solutions can add significant value. For enterprises with budget pressures or limited resources and a desire for quick time to market, partnering with a Customer IAM solution is an apt choice.

3 top benefits of CIAM solutions: -

A single customer view built from disparate pieces of data: Single view is becoming the norm for companies and it's highly relevant for all customer-facing teams. CIAM providers can help enterprises create an extensive profile for each user in the company's system, which tracks and manages their logins and devices along with their purchase histories. In addition, if the enterprise opts for social login, this profile will also add in specific interests from the social providers the customer chose for authentication. A single, detailed customer view is an excellent starting point for integrating information into CRM and making calculated decisions — such as tailoring content as per user interest, matching articles and/or advertisements to specific likes, interests, and histories to give them a more personalized experience.

Reduced customer churn with frictionless registration: Customer retention is a huge concern in nowadays — particularly when the cost of switching among products and services is low. Many companies still struggle with bad login UX. Users often must refresh tabs several times just to access a homepage. They quickly lose interest if they must recover a password more than once. A CIAM strategy that encompasses password less methods can ensure success.

Safe and secure environment: A robust and strong CIAM provider will help the enterprise set up an impenetrable CIAM system that can ensure that customer and user data is safe from cyberthreats. For example, CIAM can help implement a multi-factor authentication (MFA), — i.e., relying on additional sets of information, such as SMS codes, fingerprints, or voice recognition to gain access.

An enterprise’ IT landscape is crowdy and complex, with scattered functionality over multiple dozens of applications. Streamlining the processes is an ongoing task. Herein, business alignment, to be supported by project governance with involvement from the right stakeholders, is underestimated but crucial for making your digital transformation into a success. Assigning an experienced enterprise architect/provider with business knowledge, for keeping a helicopter overview often proves highly valuable for enterprise digital transformation in the long term. Customer Identity and access management plays a key role in digital transformation as an enabler.