Want to Improve User Experience? Consider Adding an Identity Service

The bar for engaging customer experiences is constantly being raised by the Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks of the world. In order to measure up, organizations need developer teams that are creative, nimble, and efficient. They must deliver end-user experiences that are technologically advanced, frictionless, omni-channel, and relevant.

But there are a few problems. First, developer resources are always in short supply. Second, devs are constantly wasting time on things, like identity and access management—when they could be focusing on core features and functionality.

Identity isn’t easy. It's not something just any developer can do. Most devs will struggle to build products securely, but with minimal end-user friction. Minimally viable user experiences aren’t going to cut it. A secure identity service supports the key product attributes that contribute to engagement:

• Seamless omni-channel experiences
• Simple, compelling, and self-service onboarding
• Frictionless and secure experiences
• Personalized interactions

In essence, devs should build out customer experiences on top of a secure identity layer, which will greatly reduce project overhead and risk.

Seamless omni-channel experiences

In today’s digital world, offering an experience on the closest device at hand differentiates a brand. This puts pressure on devs to build and optimize across apps and ensure seamless switching between channels.

But most dev teams operate in silos. And a general lack of identity and security expertise can put a go-live timeline at risk. More often than not, products go out the door without a thought to a cohesive and secure experience for end users.

Okta’s modern identity service adds value and reduces risk to omni-channel experiences. Okta provides devs with a platform for building out consistent onboarding and login experiences, across channels.

Simple, compelling, and self-service onboarding

Onboarding experiences are critical to the success of any digital initiative. But brands often fail to roll out onboarding in ways that are simple and compelling.

In an era of monolithic app architectures, identity was not designed to handle multi-channel digital experiences. In order to support such experiences today, developers without a modern identity service create one-off custom solutions that don’t scale.

They wind up pushing out volumes of custom code that are laden with vulnerabilities. Onboarding flows built in this manner come across to the end user as disjointed, potentially insecure, and laden with friction.

Okta unifies the onboarding experience across apps. It comes with pre-built workflows for modern onboarding experiences (such as self-service, passwordless options, and MFA). Developers can simply pull these tools down “off the shelf” and add them to their apps.

Frictionless and secure experiences

There’s no one-size fits all approach to security. The threats are always changing, so the standards must constantly change as well—it's no different with identity. For example, SMS for MFA is constantly in and out of favor with experts, the future of biometrics is unclear, and a passwordless approach is the latest trend.

Companies must be able to quickly react to this ever changing landscape or risk being out of compliance and/or missing out on important upgrades that could dramatically improve customer engagement.

What if, instead of dedicating team resources and mindshare to staying up-to-date on the latest security and identity developments (and distracting them from core business goals), you could offload this to the experts? The world’s largest brands trust Okta to keep them ahead of the curve when it comes to identity standards.

Okta has off-the-shelf tooling for deploying MFA with a variety of factors (including SMS, push notifications, and biometrics). Okta also has a console designed for security professionals to globally manage identity policies (no code required!).

Personalized interactions

People want to feel appreciated and valued as individuals. Personalized experiences are becoming critical for engagement. Eight out of ten people will do more business with a company if it incorporates personalization.

At the core of personalization is identity. The problem is, once again, that customer identities have traditionally been siloed in monolithic architectures. It’s impossible to build a 360 degree view of end users without some sort of unified identity layer. This makes it difficult for organizations to gain full customer insights, and introduces the risk of presenting irrelevant offers and content to their customers. Customers may disengage and choose a more personalized competitor.

Not only is Okta the identity layer that unifies experiences across apps and channels, our Universal Directory unifies customer identities into one secure location. All other personalization technologies can be connected through simple integrations.

A modern identity service

It is increasingly vital to the health of your business to be competitive in the digital marketplace. The rules of the marketplace have been laid down by tech-first businesses that are nimble, creative, and efficient.

You can’t afford to have legacy systems slow your devs down. There just aren’t enough of them to go around! Rather than wasting their time on identity and access management, enable them to focus on core features and functionalities.

Okta’s modern identity service is the platform layer that speeds up time-to-market for delivering seamless, secure omni-channel experiences: simple, compelling, and personalized, with self-service on-boarding.

Interested in how leading brands in travel (JetBlue), healthcare (Heal), insurance (TAL), and retail (Albertsons) utilize Okta to deliver on the four key product attributes discussed in this blog? Download our Four Ways to Improve Customer Experience with a Modern Identity Service whitepaper.