CIAM: What is customer identity and access management?
What is Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), and how can it protect your business and boost CX? We've got the answers in this primer on CIAM.
As Microsoft completely removes passwords from consumer accounts, the benefits of customer identity and access management (CIAM) are in the spotlight. The news shows how brands are prioritizing registration, login, and authentication as they seek to elevate customer experience and security.
How can CIAM address both critical issues? To get the answer, it’s important to understand what it does, where it came from, and where it’s going.
What does CIAM software do?
CIAM is often equated to a brand’s digital front door. It enables customers to create an identity with an organization and then identify themselves across digital properties to consume products or services.
Creating an identity typically involves online account registration. With CIAM, brands can quickly and effortlessly build registration screensets that render natively across different devices (web, mobile app, in-store kiosks, and more).
The software stores the first-party, permission-based data it collects in profiles, which brands can build and enrich over time. It also integrates with engagement systems and orchestrates data between them. This bi-directional flow means both engagements and profiles are kept up to date.
When customers return to a brand’s digital property, the software logs them in and authenticates them based on their credentials. A username/password combination is the most common method, but social login, biometric, and passwordless authentication are options.
Is it easy for consumers to buy from you? How customer identity management can help
Customer identity management matters because requiring customers to log in each time they visit an e-commerce site or interact with your brand can erode CX, reduce conversions, and push customers toward competitors with easier authentication processes.
The history of CIAM
In the early 2010s, most brands worked with identity access management (IAM) vendors to build their customer registration, login, and authentication experiences.
But IAM vendors specialized in identifying employees and giving them access to resources. They couldn’t improve customer experience, operate on the necessary scale, or provide reliable system performance.
Disruptive start-ups seized the opportunity. They created SaaS CIAM solutions that met security and performance requirements. Equally as important, they addressed the need for better customer experience. Businesses quickly realized the potential of this welcoming, yet secure, digital front-door strategy.
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The difference between IAM and CIAM ⬇︎
Customer experience benefits of CIAM
Today, CIAM offers several benefits to help brands acquire more known users and grow revenue:
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Improved acquisition rates
CIAM solutions enable you to design great experiences that are tailored to specific digital channels. For example, brands can turn anonymous visitors into known users by offering a newsletter sign-up requiring only a name and email. This “start small” approach is more effective than relying on full registration alone to identify customers.
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Improved checkout rates
With CIAM, you can quickly design, deploy, and test a variety of checkout experiences to identify the most optimal workflow. By combining this testing ability with a highly performant and highly available service – even in the most demanding periods of the year, such as Black Friday – CIAM helps boost e-commerce revenue.
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Enhanced personalization
CIAM profiles build as customers share more data in exchange for offers, content, and deals. With this progressive profile, you can orchestrate updated customer interests to analytics and engagement systems. This increases your ability to deliver relevant, timely, and personalized CX to strengthen brand loyalty. After all, customers are more likely to return to companies that offer a personalized experience.
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Stronger loyalty
Many customers completely stop using an account or service rather than deal with a lost password. Conversely, creating a seamless experience across touchpoints using passwordless authentication removes friction and strengthens customer retention.
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Faster time to value
With one centralized CIAM solution, your enterprise can reuse existing screensets and workflows for multiple use cases. You can even define one core process for all your properties and then customize its release as new use cases warrant. This speeds time to value as you launch new digital properties and expand into new markets.
HEAR, HERE:
The information-for-value exchange ⬇︎
Security benefits of CIAM
Account takeover attacks (ATO) are a major threat to consumers and brands around the globe. Sophisticated CIAM solutions offer rule-based and AI/ML-based approaches to address the ATO threat.
In a rule-based approach, IT teams can define a suspicious event, such as multiple log-in attempts or a change in country. If a suspicious user triggers a defined event, risk-based authentication flows activate. This forces the user through additional identification steps before being granted access.
Due to the huge amounts of data involved and state-of-the-art algorithms available, AI/ML is a promising technology to fight ATO attacks. In this approach, AI/ML models provide a risk score for every authentication request. The score defines a relevant authentication flow and helps balance security with user experience.
In addition, CIAM helps IT teams constantly monitor authentication activity, identify suspicious trends that require special attention, and take steps to improve the company’s security posture.
SOUND UP:
AI/ML, multi-factor, risk-based, and more about authentication ⬇︎
What the future holds
CIAM is well positioned to help brands grow for four key reasons.
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The skyrocketing value of first-party customer data
With Google preparing to end third-party cookies in Chrome by January 2023, customer acquisition based on digital advertising faces increased uncertainty. Many brands are pivoting their engagement strategies to focus on customer retention. This requires them to prioritize permission-based, first-party customer data, which is a strong suit of CIAM.
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Frictionless experiences
The move toward passworldless authentication will continue. Smart CIAM solutions know how to offer the right authentication based on risk and customer preference, whether it’s biometric, push notification, an email magic link, or other method. This will help improve conversion rates while reducing security concerns that come with passwords.
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Global scalability
At some point (hopefully soon), the pandemic will recede, and consumers will return to their previous globe-trotting ways. When they do, brands won’t want to risk losing customers because of a fragmented experience across regions. With CIAM, they can ensure seamless and secure account access no matter where customers travel.
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The rise of omnichannel
After COVID, customers now expect buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) service, and a single transaction history, no matter if purchases were made in-store or online. And they expect relevant product recommendations when they want them. A brand’s ability to deliver hinges on its understanding of who customers are at each touchpoint and its ability to move customer data to relevant engagement systems in real time. With CIAM, brands can achieve both goals.
LISTEN NOW:
What is hyper-personalized security ⬇︎
The role of CIAM in your CX strategy
At the end of the day, customers’ perceptions of every engagement will determine their loyalty. The right CIAM solution can help you create positive perceptions. It opens the door to secure, convenient, and personalized interactions, which lead to longer-lasting, more valuable relationships.
