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Customers’ willingness to give you their personal data begins with the experience they receive. Convincing them requires the right tone, an outlook of what they’ll get in return, and most importantly, a high level of trust. But while companies depend on customer data to unlock growth, user-centric data collection can be tricky.
43% of U.S. consumers say they would not allow companies to collect personal data, even to accommodate more personalized, customized experiences, while 88% will give you their data if they trust your brand.
With this in mind, how do you meet customer expectations and proactively build consumer trust throughout the entire customer lifecycle? Effective user journey orchestration, supported by a robust Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) solution, can help you balance security, privacy, and convenience, resulting in a trust-worthy digital experience.
5 ways CIAM safely orchestrates your customers’ journey
CIAM is an effective solution for hassle-free and secure logins that enables you to retain more customers with seamless access across various digital channels. This is how CIAM safely orchestrates your customers’ journey.
Capture and manage customer identities to remove friction at registration and login
Businesses spend a lot to acquire new customers but tend to invest less in the experience once acquired. Meanwhile, providing a seamless and convenient experience is what eventually brings loyalty – and thus, the base to harness true ROI.
With CIAM, you no longer need to push every customer through the same rigid authentication processes when they visit your site. Put simply, CIAM ensures customers are always met at the digital front door, conveniently and without friction.
For example, if customers are registering for the first time, you don’t need to ask them to enter all their personal data immediately. Ask your customer for only needed information, at the right point in their journey. This will allow them to focus on their shopping experience or the task at hand rather than filling in forms.
When an existing customer wants to log into your site, you can make smarter decisions about how many authentication hoops you should make them jump through. For example, suppose the risk environment remains unchanged, and their behavioral context is the same as before. You might decide they don’t need to enter their password again or authenticate using MFA.
CIAM allows you to adjust your authentication experience’s friction level to make your customers’ experience seamless.
1. Build robust customer profiles based on first-party, consent-based data
CIAM captures the personal data that the customer has released to your brand. This first-party data, which is based on consumer consent, enables your business to compile comprehensive client profiles by collecting and combining data from multiple channels. The data produced can assist your company in achieving a unified customer experience as your consumer engages with various business divisions.
First-party data is essential as third-party cookies are being blocked from browsers, and businesses need to invest in privacy-friendly ways to gather data for profiling their prospective customers. Besides from harnessing the value of data, consent-based data collection is a demonstration of respecting your customer’s privacy – a building block to achieving customers’ trust.
2. Orchestrate customer profiles in near real-time to other engagement solutions to deliver personalized experiences
Storing your customers’ profile data in a single platform allows you to make timely and data-informed decisions furthering engagement with your customer with other solutions.
Take, for example, the way Spotify works. When you search for your favorite artist, the platform suggests other artists with the same style. These suggestions allow you to listen to more of your favorite music and offer an impeccable personalized experience. Wouldn’t you like your brand to treat your customers the same way?
If you get to know your customers better by building rich user profiles, you can use these profiles to tailor experiences across every digital property. And your customer will keep coming back to you for more.
3. Drive the adaptive authentication experience to limit burden and enhance security
Requiring your customers to provide an additional authentication factor by implementing MFA is one of the simplest ways to increase the security of the login flow. Email is an option that is often easier to implement, but it can increase customers’ effort at the authentication flow, and building frustration might cause them to opt for a competitor.
With CIAM, you can choose the authentication options, i.e., biometrics, that will be easiest or most secure for your customers without any additional worry about how difficult they might be to integrate and maintain within your application.
A customer identity platform only asks for the authentication you need and always asks for it when you need it, providing two sides of the same coin. If you can prove to customers that the friction added to the experience is always proportionate to the situation, you’ll find it much easier to win their trust.
4. Adopt progressive profiling
A customer’s introduction to your application is often a registration process, and you need to ensure that the process is efficient, seamless, and secure so that you don’t lose the customer’s attention along the way. This might mean primarily collecting only the minimum amount of information you require from your users. A ‘just in time’ and ‘just enough’ approach to data collection is the best strategy for building a frictionless and secure prospect-to-customer journey that leads to better conversion rates.
A CIAM solution can be configured to require as many or as few pieces of information about your customers as you wish to gather. This information can be stored centrally so that you can utilize the CIAM solution as the source of truth regarding customer personal information and be assured that this data is always secured.
The main advantage of effective user journey orchestration
A significant benefit of deploying a cloud identity platform, and thereby adopting a user journey orchestration process, is that it helps establish the trust needed to build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Businesses can acquire more customers by using CIAM and progressive profiling to streamline the registration process and asking for information over time rather than forcing new customers to fill out a long sign-up form at the very beginning. Also, reducing friction during login when existing customers return to any digital property can help your business retain customers.
By enforcing appropriate security measures in every situation, CIAM shows your customers that you are a trustworthy steward of their accounts and personal data. This increases the likelihood of repeat business, reduces the risk of account abandonment, and acts as a disincentive for churn.
