The Ultimate Guide to Customer Identity for Retailers

The retail industry has shifted from competing purely on products to relying on experiences to entice shoppers to choose their brand. Retailers that can identify their customers the moment they touch a digital property have the advantage of distinguishing themselves over others that can’t. These brands have the power to make every digital touchpoint personalized, secure, and frictionless and make it impossible for a shopper to stop engaging.

This is where customer identity can make a difference. When retailers use customer identity as the foundation for interacting with shoppers online, they are able to outpace their competition, grow their customer base, and boost revenues with tailored end-to-end shopping experiences that are simultaneously seamless and secure.

Let’s take a closer look at what customer identity is, the impact it can have on the retail experience, and how your brand can use it to delight and protect your customers online.

Retailers pivoted rapidly to meet the demand for digital shopping experiences by compressing 10 years’ worth of growth and ecommerce transformation into the first quarter of 2020. But that doesn’t mean the digital revolution for retail stopped there. It continued on as shoppers started to return to stores and retailers blended brick-and-mortar with digital. Retailers created bold, differentiating shopping experiences to attract and keep customers, boost sales, and stand out in a crowded market.

However, many customers have not completely abandoned their pandemic habits of relying on online shopping to purchase goods and services. The past two years have digitally rewired customers to choose digital channels and ecommerce over in-store. Shoppers have now fully bought into the convenience of quickly and securely shopping for items online, with the option of having items delivered to their doorstep or picking them up at the store.

Retailers have responded to shifting preferences by adopting new technologies and headless commerce strategies to acquire and retain shoppers, who are increasingly engaging with retailers exclusively online. But the rise in online channels has also opened up new opportunities for fraud and breaches and has made it more urgent for retailers to protect themselves and their customers. Now retailers have to optimize security alongside convenience in every digital interaction. But if a solid customer identity foundation is used in digital experiences, retailers have the power to innovate, drive sales, and secure at the same time.

Customer identity, otherwise known as customer identity and access management (CIAM), allows retailers to securely capture and manage shoppers’ identity and profile data and to control what applications, services, and information shoppers have access to.

The role of customer identity in the online shopping journey is sometimes thought to be a set of capabilities used only on a log-in screen or a registration form. But in reality, as the number of digital touchpoints increases across the entire customer journey, the influence of customer identity has expanded to protect and remove friction at every step.

Customer identity is the key enabler of optimizing security and convenience at critical interaction points in the shopping journey where the chances for abandonment are high, like creating an account, checking out, or reaching out to support. It allows you to know who your customers are without sacrificing a seamless experience. And you can use the identity and profile information you have on your customers to personalize every interaction with relevant recommendations or offers that drive business.

Retailers are rolling out transformation efforts to grow their customer base, open up new opportunities to increase revenue, and reduce costs. But what can retailers expect to achieve when they use customer identity to create smooth and secure end-to-end online shopping journeys?

Seamless Omnichannel Experiences

Customers view shopping not as individual touchpoints across multiple channels but as a singular experience that makes it simple and fast to purchase what they want at any time of day. Retailers can use customer identity to eliminate friction and drive engagement by making it easy for shoppers to identify themselves and scale to meet them anytime, anywhere.

Personalization at Scale

Customers prefer retailers that make them feel special with tailored recommendations, offers, and experiences. This level of personalization requires retailers to effectively collect and centralize profile information to build rich guest profiles to curate consistent, engaging experiences for every shopper. With customer identity, retailers can create a single view of every customer that every application can tap into to personalize each interaction.

Secure Online Transactions

Bad actors are looking at the rise in ecommerce, loyalty programs, and new digital channels as opportunities for fraud and breaches. At the same time, shoppers see it as a brand’s duty to keep them secure during every digital interaction and transaction. Retailers can strengthen their security with customer identity to fight against fraud and breaches to earn the trust of their customer base and prevent the negative financial and brand impacts of attacks.

Accelerate Innovation to Outpace Competition

Brands at the forefront of user experience are adopting new technologies to innovate how shoppers purchase products and services online. But this requires a high level of agility to innovate without disrupting customers or the business. Customer identity can help retailers rapidly add and orchestrate new technologies into their online shopping experiences to ensure they are retail leaders, not followers.

Rapid ROI on Experience Enhancements

It has become more important than ever for brands to quickly evaluate the performance of their digital investments to continuously optimize their online shopping strategy. Customer identity provides retailers with the power to experiment with digital shopping experiences to optimize every interaction point so that identifying who your shoppers are doesn’t deter them from smashing that “Buy” button.

Identifying customers the moment they touch a digital property can give brands a unique advantage in creating standout experiences by tailoring every interaction to drive engagement while enhancing security by having the right level of assurance that customers are who they say they are.

Unfortunately, asking customers for their information tends to add unnecessary friction to the user experience, particularly when they are not yet ready to hand it over. This type of friction leads to abandoned carts or checkouts, but not asking for their information can open up gaps in security.

Customer identity can let retailers optimize convenience and security in every interaction to deliver bold, personalized, and differentiated shopping experiences. Let’s take a look at where in the shopping journey retailers can transform the experience using customer identity to drive revenue and lower churn and abandonment rates.

Retailers are always looking for ways to eliminate any friction in the shopping experience that could result in abandonment. Getting rid of any source of frustration for customers when creating an account, logging in, and completing a transaction can make shopping simpler and lower cart and checkout abandonment rates.

• Social Registration & Login

  Make it quick and easy for shoppers to identify themselves by using existing social media accounts (i.e., Facebook and Google) to create an account or sign in. They get to shopping more quickly, and you know who you are engaging with instantly.

   

• Single Sign-on

  Give your customers one set of credentials to remember so they can securely sign on to any of your digital properties without having to remember a different password that could potentially be forgotten and get in the way of completing a purchase.

   

• Passwordless Authentication

  What’s better for your customers than having to remember one password? Having to remember zero passwords. Don’t let passwords get in the way of a customer checking out. Use passwordless methods of authentication, like biometrics, one-time passcodes, and magic links.

   

• Guest Checkout

  Give your customers the option to check out as a guest and then follow up with an offer after purchase to create an account. This lets your customers quickly purchase what they need and gives you an opportunity to ask for information at a time when they are more amenable to handing over information about themselves.

Customers expect retailers to keep their data safe and secure every transaction. Customer identity is foundational to a secure end-to-end customer journey where shoppers can trust that brands are protecting them from fraud and breaches.

• Protect Shopper Data

  Shoppers trust retailers with their personal information in exchange for a personalized, superior experience. Maintain that trust by being good stewards of their data and ensuring it is securely stored and encrypted.

• Secure Access

  Enhance the security of your digital experiences by taking an adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA) approach to protecting shoppers by continuously evaluating user behavior and other risk signals to decide in real-time whether a customer needs to use MFA when making a purchase. Also, you can confirm all high-value purchases with MFA and a simple push notification to your shopper’s mobile phone.

• Online Fraud Detection

  Detect possible fraudulent activities such as credential stuffing, credit card testing, inventory hoarding, gift card fraud, account takeover, and new account fraud by monitoring how a visitor behaves when interacting with your digital properties. Then, decide whether a visitor is a fraudster without impacting the experience of legitimate shoppers (no annoying CAPTCHAs) while preventing the financial impacts of fraud on your customers and business.

Customers don’t view themselves as average, so “one size fits all” shopping experiences aren’t going to cut it with today’s digital shoppers. Use customer identity to curate individualized shopping experiences for every customer to give your brand the opportunity to earn loyalty, open up cross-sell and up-sell offers to drive revenue, and decrease churn.

• Progressive Profiling

  Asking your customers too many questions right off the bat when opening an account might not get you exactly what you want. They might just give you fake data to get through the process faster or, even worse, abandon account creation altogether. Progressive profiling takes an intentional approach to asking customers for more information throughout the entire journey to build rich profiles your brand can use to effectively personalize each interaction.

• Single View of the Shopper

  Every digital channel should have access to the same shopper profile data to ensure that each touchpoint is consistent and the experience is tailored to the individual customer. Unify all your customer profile data to create a single view of the shopper so that no matter what channel a customer uses, you can offer them an experience that is personalized and what they expect.

• Social and Omnichannel Shopping

  Make shopping social and personalized by letting your guests securely share wish lists or shopping lists with their family and friends. Also, if a shopper “favorites” a product on one digital channel, ensure they can see that item as a favorite on every other digital channel.

If your customers are contacting support, it’s often because they’re experiencing a problem and there is a chance they are frustrated. Don’t add to the frustration by making your customers go through a tedious process to verify their identity. Use customer identity to streamline how your shoppers prove who they are with support so you can quickly resolve the issue.

• Self-service

  Make it simple for customers to update their profile information and reset their passwords on their own without having to reach out to support for assistance.

• Eliminate Redundant Authentication

  If your customer is already logged into their account and selects “call support”, they shouldn’t have to prove their identity again. The first authentication should suffice. Using persistent sessions will help your support representatives get started on resolving your customer’s issues faster rather than having to authenticate them again.

Retailers can’t give up on brick and mortar just yet, with an estimated 39% of consumer interactions in 2022 occurring offline. But the momentum of the digital revolution in retail is growing, and retailers are rolling out transformation efforts to grow their customer base, open up new opportunities to increase revenue, and reduce costs. Retailers that embrace customer identity have the power to deliver on the promise of digital innovation and set themselves up for success as leaders in online shopping experiences.

Want to find out how you can use Ping Identity’s customer identity solution to create smooth and secure end-to-end online shopping journeys? Visit our Retail page today.