In a previous blog my colleague, Minttu Junikka, wrote about why digital identity is a company-wide responsibility. To summarise, whilst Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is traditionally seen as an IT Security team responsibility, such a core part of your apps and services is a crucial enabler to success across multiple business functions.

Quick recap on ‘What is CIAM’

In this post, I provide an overview of how digital identity, in particular CIAM (as opposed to employee IAM), specifically aids Customer Experience and Marketing team objectives.

For a deeper dive into the subject, download this free white paper – “Leverage CIAM for a better customer experience and more effective marketing”.

Leveraging CIAM for a better customer experience

Whoever your customers are – private, corporate, partners, citizens – a good user experience is critical to ensuring they use your digital apps and services on a regular basis.

Your users’ first encounter with your service is registering for an account – asking them to provide identity details to gain access to the appropriate areas of your applications. This is a critical point in the user experience. Users expect seamless registration and login experiences, and any friction to these processes will increase signup abandonment. Integrating the right CIAM capabilities will allow you to build this access journey tailored to your specific audience, giving users options for authentication (think beyond passwords to social media login and biometrics) and removing the need for multiple logins for different services (Single Sign-On).

Self-service account management is another key area of CIAM that users have come to expect as standard. Rather than contacting support teams for a manual reset of credentials and or change of communication preferences, self-service account management gives the power back to the user to do this themselves.

Additionally, delegated authority is a customer experience gold standard, enabling individual or organisation users to simply delegate the right to use digital services on their behalf in B2B, B2C and B2B2C applications. This is far more user friendly and secure than manual delegation.

Leveraging CIAM for more effective marketing

In addition to a great customer experience promoting business growth, CIAM also enables big marketing wins.

The first thing to note here is that the best CIAM solutions integrate seamlessly with your CRM. What’s more, it increases the data accuracy of your CRM by encouraging users to keep their personal data current, facilitating personalisation and more strategic marketing planning.

Further, federation is a brilliant way to promote your brand through external third-party services, allowing you to build tactical links between your own services and other organisations.

And remember – data security is a business advantage. Don’t add your brand to the list of data breaches we see in the news every day. Trust in your organisation is essential to its ongoing success.

Find out more

Appropriate balancing of security, marketing and user experience is a fine art, which you can master with CIAM.

For more information, download and share our free white paper – “Leverage CIAM for a better customer experience and more effective marketing”.