Reaping the Many Benefits of CIAM

“Well-executed digital experiences can reduce costs, expand your customer base
and boost loyalty with current customers to the tune of billions of dollars.”(5)

~ Gartner

Business and marketing leaders who want to improve customer experience increasingly rely on CIAM to enable the types of experiences that customers expect. CIAM also gives enterprises a competitive advantage by enabling them to quickly and securely execute new digital business strategies.

As you move toward selecting and maturing your CIAM solution, you can realize business benefits across six key areas:

1. Higher conversion rates

2. More customer engagement

3. Greater customer loyalty and retention

4. Improved business agility and simplified CIAM administration

5. Stronger security posture and mitigated risk

6. Increased revenue

    

Higher Conversion Rates

CIAM supports your ability to acquire more customers faster, increase conversions and craft loyalty-building introductions to your brand. With CIAM solutions, you can:

• Deliver simple and secure authentication experiences via SSO to any application across any digital property, including third-party applications.

• Reduce customer friction and improve conversions by leveraging social login, allowing customers to reuse accounts from social identity providers like Google and Facebook.

• Speed time to market by leveraging out-of-the-box registration and authentication capabilities, such as email verification, password policies, account recovery, reCAPTCHA and more.

   

More Customer Engagement

After a customer is registered, a CIAM solution should deliver a unified customer profile that enables personalization and a consistent experience across all channels and devices. Consider how these aspects of CIAM will improve your customer engagement:

• Offer self-service convenience that allows customers to manage their account, preferences and data-sharing consent from any channel.

• Capture and manage explicit customer preferences, and leverage them for real-time, consistent personalization across all channels.

• Provide lightning-fast response times and no outages, even during peak usage scenarios.

• Scale to support deployments containing hundreds of millions of identities and billions of attributes.

   

Greater Customer Loyalty and Retention

CIAM helps you retain customers by securing sensitive data and adhering to customers’ data-sharing consent and privacy directives. A CIAM solution supports increased trust and loyalty by enabling you to:

• Protect customer data and ensure privacy by enforcing attribute-by-attribute-level consent and giving customers control over who has access to their data.

• Leverage centralized preferences to consistently enforce customer opt-in/opt-out choices, communication preferences and more across channels.

   

Improved Business Agility and Simplified CIAM Administration

CIAM can increase your agility and speed your time to market with modern developer-friendly REST APIs or LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). This reduces your hardware footprint and total cost of ownership through data storage efficiency, simplified management and system-wide visibility. You’re able to:

• Speed your time to market for new apps with features like centralized security, SSO and privacy policies. App dev teams can focus on building apps, not managing and securing identities.

• Bi-directionally sync and/or migrate data across heterogeneous data sources to create a unified customer profile accessible to all apps and channels.

• Deploy your applications flexibly and anywhere your customers need, whether on-premises, in the cloud or in virtual environments.

   

Stronger Security Posture and Mitigated Risk

CIAM solutions secure authentication, application access and sensitive customer data to protect your brand and minimize risks. CIAM solutions promote a strong security posture, so you can:

• Provide support for customizable MFA with secure second factors—such as the ability to send push notifications for authorization—and support for out-of-band transaction approvals and web and mobile authentications.

• Encrypt customer data at all stages, provide active alerts, restrict admin access, secure data access logs and enforce security best practices.

• Ensure authorized access to only the web, mobile and API resources your customers need.

• Reduce attack vectors by restricting sensitive customer data attributes from being accessed by potentially vulnerable applications and devices that don’t need them to function.

   

Increased Revenue

We’ve discussed how CIAM solutions enable you to use SSO for convenient authentications. We’ve also seen how you can benefit from unified profiles with rich customer data that can be used to personalize experiences across channels, and give customers insight and control over their privacy and consent preferences. Several of these capabilities contribute directly to increased revenue by allowing you to:

• Deliver a unified and consistent customer experience, strengthening brand loyalty.

• Craft personalized, cross-channel experiences that increase customer engagement.

• Demonstrate the highest regard for personalization and privacy, building brand trust.

   

Partnering with IT

The advantages of CIAM are undeniable. However, as a business leader, you must look beyond the surface-level benefits. All vendors will use words like “scale” and “security” to describe their product offering, but not all CIAM solutions are created equal. Some have less under the hood than others. Make sure you involve your IT team early so they can carefully evaluate a solution’s scalability, performance, security and overall technical capabilities before entrusting a vendor with your customer identities.