Want a Thriving Business? Focus on Customers. Focus on CIAM.
‘Focus on customers’ is an overused cliche but it remains correct, now more than ever because today’s hyper-connected customers are more informed, empowered, impatient, demanding and unpredictable. These tech-savvy users of the on-demand economy view digital interactions as the primary mechanism for connecting with brands. They are less tolerant of poor or frustrating online experiences and therefore expect significant online interactions to be delivered simply and seamlessly. It goes without saying that security is absolutely crucial in all of this. As more businesses create more sophisticated customer-facing systems, they will need more robust identity and access management mechanisms in place.
Most businesses have a large number of customers who access mobile, IoT and other channels in addition to mere old web apps. As consumers increasingly conduct high-value, sensitive transactions digitally, it becomes imperative for organizations to protect their businesses from threats to consumer-facing channels, particularly in the context of financial services, pharmaceutical, and other highly regulated industries. At the same time, collecting, storing, and analyzing consumer data allow enterprises and government organizations to provide better digital experiences for their consumers. Why? This creates additional sales opportunities and increases brand loyalty. Companies that capitalize on customer insights have a competitive advantage over their contenders who do not. As the number of customers, applications, and services continues to grow, the data collected on customers is also increasing rapidly. Because consumer data is collected from various channels, this data is often found in disparate identity stores, creating inconsistent user experiences and hindering the ability to have a single unified view of these consumers. As mentioned earlier, customer experience is the deciding factor for any business as far as digital interactions are concerned. With each swipe, scroll, tap and voice command, if the experience isn’t up to their standards, it is a given than customers will go elsewhere. However, the increased focus on customer experience has also created a focus on privacy concerns. Customers do expect some control around how firms collect, store, manage, and share their profile data. With the competition only a click away, a company’s misuse of customer data, whether deliberate or inadvertent, can significantly damage brand equity. So, how can businesses address the security, privacy, and experience needs of their digital customers?
Secure and Seamless Customer Experience — CIAM to the Rescue
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the security discipline that enables individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons. Customer Identity and Access Management helps organizations to scale and ensure secure, seamless digital experiences for their customers while collecting and managing customer identity data purposefully. CIAM goes beyond traditional IAM, also known as Workforce IAM. The goal of workforce IAM is to reduce the risk and cost associated with on-boarding and off-boarding new employees, partners and suppliers. By contrast, the purpose of CIAM is to help drive revenue growth by leveraging identity data to acquire and retain customers. An effective CIAM system provides more than just access because it enables a relationship between the customer and the organization and facilitates data sharing on which cross-marketing capabilities and business intelligence activities depend.
Benefits of CIAM
Here’s a list of reasons why enterprises should focus on CIAM for continuous business success:
- CIAM provides a holistic view of the customer allowing companies to track customers’ actions across various access points. Failure to do so will result in creating significant risk and lost opportunities. It’s important to understand customers like never before to not just make a sale, but to create the next plateau for engagement.
- CIAM provides a unified customer experience. It enables customer conversion and retention through consistent registration and authentication options at extreme scale and performance. Delivering personalized, real-time experiences help customers take their next steps intuitively, conveniently and joyfully.
- CIAM can deliver consolidated reports and analytics around users to drive various sales opportunities. When businesses have unprecedented access to nuanced customer data, such as user demographics, registration data, behavioral data, revenue activity etc, they can create more value-added experiences and personalization for their customers. This helps to build a bridge between marketing and line of business.
- CIAM ensures adherence to privacy regulations because organizations must follow the rules and regulations pertaining to gathering user data enforced by governments and different industrial bodies.
Key Features of a CIAM Solution
A powerful CIAM solution provides a variety of key features including customer registration, social logins, account verification, self-service account management, consent and preference management, single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and adaptive authentication as well as other nice-to-have features to deliver the right balance of security and experience.
CIAM — A Reference Architecture
CIAM capabilities are, in fact, not rendered by a single product. These capabilities are more often than not provided via an integrated solution, usually integrating an IAM system, a data analytics solution, customer data platforms, data management platforms, identity proofing systems, e-commerce platforms and more. CIAM requirements evolve over time with new business requirements. Therefore, organizations need an agile, event-driven consumer IAM platform that can flex to meet both new business opportunities and challenges.
WSO2 Identity Server along with WSO2 API Manager, WSO2 Enterprise Integrator and WSO2 Stream Processor, provide out-of-the-box features to address common CIAM patterns and also extension points to extend its feature set to address unique customer needs. To learn more about implementing CIAM requirements via a set of commonly-implemented architecture patterns with WSO2, check out this white paper I recently wrote.
Any feedback, changes, or contributions are most welcome. If you have any feedback or questions about the content of the white paper, please feel free to email them to me at dakshitha@wso2.com. Please do ★star the repository to show your interest!
