The ability to oversee your Customer Identity Access Management (CIAM) during and after the COVID-19 pandemic could potentially make-or-break your customer experience (CX). The pandemic is increasing customer’s appetite for digital commerce, marketplaces and retail spaces. This digital move opens both opportunities, as well as areas for concern. Being able to manage a growing number of customers, and monitoring the significantly increased pressure on digital workflows will be key factors for success. A business that securely and smoothly authenticates its customers and ensures a safe digital perimeter guarantees its own long-term viability during and after the COVID-19 era.
Balancing customer experience and customer security is a delicate art-form.
Simplicity versus Privacy & Security: a double paradox?
In a world where touchpoints are becoming more digital, it is important for the customer to have a good first impression created by a smooth and convenient entry to the digital platform. They expect to have access to your platform through all devices, without having to sign in multiple times. This is made possible through various identity providers such as Facebook, Twitter or Google, and enables your customer to access your environment without having to register and create yet another account. In addition, users are no longer required to continuously provide credentials when your company uses a single sign-on. Despite these advantages, customers may still worry that their private information is being used to logon to an e-commerce platform. How can they be sure that their private information is not being shared between the Identity Provider (e.g. Facebook) and your e-commerce platform? A good platform guarantees the privacy of your customers and offers a smooth authentication and authorization process.
By welcoming your customers onto your online platform, you open the door to your company’s private online space. However, this might damage your digital perimeter. KPMG’s experience showed that customers hold companies responsible for protecting their data at all cost. Customers always expect a business’s digital space to be secure and well protected. However, relentless identity verification might drive potential customers away. Therefore, the art of customer security is making your environment as secure as possible without impacting the underlying customer experience. A CIAM solution will help to keep customer data secure and safe, while ensuring an outstanding customer experience.
Your virtual customer environment is here to stay!
The number of people accessing your environment will continue to grow over the coming years. This might sound as an exploding issue, but there are some big advantages to it as well. Data is the essential word in these GDPR-inspired times. When clients interact with your virtual environment, they leave behind a lot of very valuable information. A strong and focused CIAM strategy aligned with a well-structured and data-driven marketing strategy will strengthen your market position.
Collecting and storing this customer identity information can also be used to further increase and personalize the customer experience, and thus attract new customers via the same online method (Market targeting). Most CIAM solutions come are supported by data-driven reporting and dashboarding. In this way, stakeholders can use the appropriate information to further develop and shape the future of your customers and your company. Identity and information go hand-in-hand when (re)thinking and building the future.
This article is part of a larger narrative with regards to identities and their behaviors. Whereas the workforce IAM is spotlighted in this case, a sharper focus will be put on the customer, as well as on OT. These articles will appear here in the coming weeks.
Authors: Karel Dekyvere, Cedric Guisson, Louis Dacquin
