How CIOs Are Leveraging Their Customer Data

The way you collect and leverage customer data can greatly impact your customers’ experiences. After all, the process of gathering user data through registration and subsequent logins is the front door to your brand, and those early impressions can lay out the welcome mat or turn off the porch light and lock the virtual door. In addition, how you store and maintain customer data can also affect user experiences, as your customers expect consistent and convenient interactions no matter how they choose to connect with your brand.

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) has become a critical part of customer experience for ANZ enterprises. Unified profiles that enable you to consistently personalize experiences across channels, along with single sign-on (SSO) and smooth multi- factor authentication (MFA) for convenient application access, ensure that customers think they’re interacting with a single brand instead of a collection of different applications—and is critical to gaining a competitive edge on your competition.

We surveyed CIOs in ANZ to identify trends in how they’re collecting, storing and managing customer identity data. This article lays out the key findings and provides guidance for facilitating welcoming customer experiences.

Key Findings
 

• Multiple customer-facing applications are the new normal. 86% of the companies we surveyed have at least 2 customer applications, and 29% had more than 20 apps.
   

• Single sign-on for customers has plenty of room to grow. More than one half of the organizations polled don’t have SSO to all customer-facing apps.
   

• Despite their benefits, few companies have unified customer profiles. No company surveyed reported that it met every condition of truly unified customer profiles, such as common customer preferences and personally identifiable information recognized across all applications.
   

• Multi-factor authentication is a go-to technology for ANZ enterprises. More than 70% of respondents include MFA in some applications, primarily to enhance security and prevent fraud.

What the Data Reveal

Multiple customer-facing apps are the norm today. Across industry, geography and physical location, customers increasingly are interacting with brands digitally via self-service portals, CSR touch points, mobile apps, sales channels and more.

Of the enterprises we surveyed, we found:
 

Worldwide trends indicate that the number of customer-facing apps per company will continue to rise as consumers expect expanded digital access to a range of products and services. Consider the mobile app market alone. In 2017, global consumers downloaded 178 billion mobile apps, and that number is projected to grow to 258 billion by 2022¹—and business apps come in second overall (behind gaming), at nearly 10% of the apps downloaded in the Apple App Store.²

The Benefits

Multiple apps are necessary to serve the different needs of your customers, allowing improved customer satisfaction and enhancing all of your interactions. But keep in mind that your end users shouldn’t necessarily know the apps are completely separate. Despite the different app functions, mediums and teams developing them, you should be creating a seamless experience so that your customers get the impression that they’re interacting with a single brand. 

What the Data Reveal

This area presents a real opportunity for ANZ enterprises. SSO is often one of the first customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions that enterprises choose to implement, but many haven’t taken advantage of this yet, as just over half of those we surveyed don’t have SSO to all customer-facing applications. That means these organizations are missing out on the opportunity to create consistent and convenient user-friendly login and registration processes.

Items like lack of standards support in applications shouldn’t be a barrier. Ping Identity’s robust, standards- based federated SSO solution can provide consistent and convenient SSO to all of your apps.
 

The Benefits

By removing the need for customers to remember a number of passwords to log in to their applications, you provide a consistent front door to your brand, which makes a large positive impact on the customer experience. The customer experience is further enhanced when the sign-on process is convenient as well, offering features like social login, social account linking, convenient password policies and more. You end up with not just happier end users, but also cost savings for your business, faster troubleshooting and improved security.

Consider, for example, how relying on identity standards lowers password reuse (well known to increase the likelihood of vulnerability to a bad actor) and diminishes the attack surface (by creating fewer places to store passwords). When you forgo the disparate security practices of each individual app’s login process and rely on secure identity standards and centralized authentication security, you achieve both higher security and a better customer experience. Even if some customer apps aren’t on board with standards, you can still provide SSO to those applications to enhance customer experience. 

What the Data Reveal

This is another area in which ANZ companies have a strong opportunity to improve the customer experience. Customers are fickle. Unlike employees, they can easily be wooed to competitors. Even after a customer logs in, their seamless experiences must continue. By creating a single place to store customer data, preference and customer consent, you create convenient and personalized experiences across all customer interactions with your brand—not just login and registration—helping you stay ahead of the competition.

But of the enterprises we surveyed:
 

The Benefits

Having unified customer profiles can not only create more consistently personalized customer experiences across apps, but it comes with a wealth of additional benefits. One, complying with privacy regulations is easier; e.g., synced and consolidated data facilitate adherence to requirements such as GDPR’s stipulations on data access and portability. Two, you increase enterprise security overall, as more data silos mean more attack vectors and often-varying levels of security across your customer data topology. And three, you lower your total cost of ownership, because a single directory is typically more efficient, requiring fewer dedicated resources and fewer server resources.

Many enterprises would like to have a unified customer profile, but creating it can be a daunting task. Often, forklift migrations are impossible, though many CIAM solutions seem to require them. Instead, Ping can help facilitate the creation of a unified profile with advanced bi-directional synchronization and other features that allow you to safely migrate data and apps, and begin creating a unified profile at your own pace. Using a secure directory solution like PingDirectory also ensures that your customer data and personally identifiable information (PII) are secure. 

What the Data Reveal

Most of the enterprises we surveyed have multi-factor authentication (MFA) to at least one app, with the primary purpose of enhancing security and preventing fraud. These companies have learned that unlike with workforce MFA, customers usually won’t use hard tokens or third-party applications. Rather, they need to offer MFA in a medium their customers are already using, like SMS, email, or push notifications from the enterprise’s own mobile app.

At Ping, we strongly recommend the latter. SMS and email are better than no second factor at all, but push notifications are more convenient; they simply require users to facescan, fingerprint or otherwise authenticate to their smartphone. In addition, push notifications are also more secure in that they leverage unique identifiers that are tied to a single device, unlike phone numbers that can move from device to device. When trusted devices are created using unique device identifiers, they are much less susceptible to SIM swapping, spoofing or credential sharing, which can compromise SMS and email MFA.

The Benefits

Once your enterprise has implemented a secure and convenient MFA factor, you can use it for many purposes, like transaction approval, CSR identity verification, web and mobile logins, password reset and more. This results in more secure interactions, better protection for high-value transactions, and a more user-friendly and secure customer experience than knowledge-based authentication (KBA), which is notorious for frustrating end users with not-so-secret secret questions or verification answers that are difficult to remember.

Ping offers the PingID SDK, a convenient way to embed strong authentication into your own mobile app for a secure user experience that minimizes friction. You can even use it to enforce passwordless login with capabilities like QR code login, or by simply using that authN factor instead of user name and password and PW. 

Customer identity and access management has many capabilities that allow you to make the most of your customer data, ensuring that data is kept secure and that you’re using it to its maximum potential to enhance customer experiences across all of your business units and digital properties. SSO is often the lowest-hanging fruit and a good entry point to CIAM, but unified profiles, secure and convenient customer MFA and other features can help deliver the personalization and convenience that today’s consumers expect.

To learn more about customer identity and access management with Ping Identity, read our whitepaper “Getting Customer IAM Right.”

1 “25 Mobile App Usage Statistics To Know In 2019,” MindSea, accessed March 25, 2019, https://mindsea.com/app-stats/
2 Ibid.

 

#3417 | 04.09.2019 | v001