Executive Summary
Protecting your customers’ credentials and data is critical if you want to keep them as your customers. As high-profile data breaches make the news, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of potential security threats. Because of this, these concerned customers are also paying more attention to how organizations secure their data and protect their identities overall.
Some attack vectors—like attempting to steal customer credentials through brute force attacks—can be proactively mitigated by security measures implemented within your organization. But others—such as phishing scams or shared credentials that are compromised at other organizations—are more difficult to preempt. In either case, should you become the unfortunate target of attack, your company and brand reputation are at risk.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides a critical extra layer of protection to your enterprise and your customers. No longer just for employee use cases, MFA can be successfully leveraged to secure your customers’ interactions with your digital properties and mitigate the ripple effect of compromised credentials.
That being said, while verification solutions like MFA can certainly enhance security, those solutions can also make login experiences more frustrating for users when they’re not done right. Customers want experiences that are fast and frictionless, yet also expect organizations to protect them against breaches, privacy violations and fraud without compromising those experiences. Therefore, meeting customers’ high-expectations has kept organizations under constant pressure to find the balance between security and convenience in their digital experiences in order to drive customer engagement, satisfaction and ultimately loyalty.
The good news is that customer security and convenience don’t have to be mutually exclusive. However, to get customer MFA right, you need to make implementation choices that ensure both customer experience and security are optimized for various use cases. You also need to determine the best way to introduce MFA to your customer base and decide if that means requiring it or making it optional.
Implementing multi-factor authentication for customer use requires careful planning. But when done correctly, it can give your customers the additional security they need without sacrificing the seamless experience they expect.
With 56% of customers having ditched an account after becoming frustrated with trying to login and 60% having abandoned a service because of concerns about how their data is used, today's customers' expectations are higher than ever before.1