a good thing!
Ultimate Guide to Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
4 - Evaluating Customer Identity Solutions
5 - Start Building Your Business Case for Customer Identity
5 - Start Building Your Business Case for Customer Identity
CX is a strategic priority for many organizations. A thoughtfully chosen and well-implemented customer identity solution can make a huge impact on both your organization’s top and bottom lines. Yes, many are challenged to demonstrate the return on investment that CX (and by proxy customer identity) provides.
According to Gartner's 2019 Customer Experience Innovation Survey, “Many organizations have faced crisis situations in their CX program within the last three years. Economic or financial pressure has impacted the highest proportion of respondents (53%). For those with lower maturity levels, 60% had CX initiative launches stalled due to lack of executive support, and 59% found it difficult to demonstrate value or ROI, which leads the CFO to question all future investments.”
While the ultimate decision maker in your organization may vary, it’s not unusual for line-of-business (LOB) executives as well as IT executives to be involved. It behooves you to involve these LOB-stakeholders because they have access to larger budgets and can help you evangelize the benefits of customer IAM when you demonstrate its value. Because customer identity data is of interest to marketing and sales, you’ll also want to consider their needs to ensure you identify the right solution to meet cross-functional requirements.
Building a business case for a customer identity starts with recognizing and understanding that customer IAM has a broad impact on your organization. Ensuring you address individual interests is key to making a business case and the best decision. Here are the typical players involved and how to appeal to what they care about most.
Business Executives
Business executives are focused on the overall business and decisions that will advance big-picture objectives. That means you want to avoid talking about details like login forms and profile management. Instead, start with an understanding of what their goals are, then convey how customer identity aligns to them. Focus your message on how identity helps you deliver better customer experiences that ultimately drive revenue. Highlight that identity can help you significantly reduce abandonment, acquire customers, and increase engagement. Remember, these are the people who have access to large budgets, so making a case for how customer identity can advance your organization’s strategic objectives can move the needle in a big way for your organization.
What They Care About: How customer identity impacts top-line revenue, customer acquisition and retention.
How to Communicate Customer Identity’s Value:
IT Executives
IT leaders may be tuned into customer experience and revenue to some degree, but they’re also burdened by taking on more responsibility and with fewer resources. They’re concerned about how a solution is architected and how well it can adapt to meet changing requirements. You’ll want to address how it can reduce costs, improve business agility and ensure security.
What They Care About: How customer identity meets their needs and impacts bottom-line savings.
How to Communicate Customer Identity’s Value:
IT / IAM Professionals
These IT or identity experts are the ones who have to get their hands dirty implementing whichever solution is chosen. As a result, they’ll be concerned with the capabilities of the solution and whether it’s going to be able to meet their needs and address the specific use cases within their enterprise.
What They Care About: What capabilities customer identity provides and how easy it will be to implement and manage.
How to Communicate Customer Identity’s Value:
Security Teams
What keeps security teams up at night is worrying about resources being secure and risks being managed effectively. A breach is their worst nightmare. Their mission is to ask the tough questions to reveal the vulnerabilities.
What They Care About: How customer identity helps secure resources and minimizes risk.
How to Communicate Customer Identity’s Value:
Application Teams
App teams have one goal above all others: Launch apps on time. Often, app developers aren’t identity or security experts, so these processes can slow them down. Identity can help app teams by taking the complexities of identity and security off their plates and ensuring that they can focus on the app’s features and meeting critical app launch deadlines.
How to Communicate Customer Identity’s Value:
Getting Customer Identity Right
CX is still the battlefield on which brands compete. Those who prioritize delivering extraordinary CX will emerge as the leaders in their industries and categories.
By using customer identity to address your customers’ expectations throughout their journey, you’re on your way to delivering the standout CX that will position you for competitive advantage. When you get customer identity right, you’re able to:
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