To Accelerate Business Growth, You Need an Effective Customer Identity Strategy

In today’s increasingly online world, businesses need to have a strong digital presence to connect with customers—both old and new—while also driving continuous engagement. One of the key technologies that can help companies get this right is customer identity and access management (CIAM). In this post, we’ll cover how brands can leverage CIAM to create successful digital experiences that support business growth.  

Acquire new users with great access experiences

Savvy brands know that first impressions are lasting impressions—especially considering that even the smallest inconveniences can quickly drive customers away in the early stages of their journey. This is why some of the initial user touchpoints, such as registration, account creation, and authentication can easily make or break the customer experience (CX).  

A modern CIAM solution can help create frictionless and delightful access experiences, so that you don’t lose customers over hiccups in usability and convenience. Here is a sample checklist of items you can achieve with CIAM that ensure a great CX for your digital platforms: 

• Design attractive, highly customized, and branded registration pages to differentiate your brand from the competition.
• Make it easy for your users to create accounts on any device, from mobile phones to smart TVs.
• Build a simple yet effective registration process that asks users for just the right amount of information, so you don’t frustrate or deter them with unnecessary or lengthy requests.
• Offer social media authentication to simplify the registration experience and eliminate the need for additional account creation.

Altogether, a robust CIAM solution makes access experiences simple and enjoyable, minimizing abandonment and maximizing new customer acquisitions. This is something we’ve seen at Albertsons: the grocer supports end-to-end user registration and authentication for 30 million customers per week, using Okta to capture new customers with a consistent digital experience whenever and wherever they need it.

Convert customers with a personalized approach

Once you’ve acquired new users, CIAM can help you leverage your knowledge of the customer to build more relevant, higher-converting digital experiences.  The right CIAM solution enables a complete, 360-degree view of customer profiles and preferences by consolidating and centralizing user data across various sources including both internal and third-party systems. This unified view provides for a better understanding of who your customers are and what they want, so that you can tailor your outreach and campaigns for a more effective marketing strategy. 

Crate and Barrel offers a good example of what this looks like in practice. The large home-furnishing retailer partnered with Okta to improve and streamline the access experience for customers, allowing shoppers to use one set of credentials across their various sites and apps. With a better view of each customer and the ability to look at their journey in a unified way, the retailer could deliver personalized content to drive engagement. The initiative was immediately successful—the company saw a 10-16% increase in customers signing in and creating accounts during checkout (vs. signing in as “guests”), generating significant new revenue opportunities for the business. 

Retain customers with a consistent, trustworthy service

After acquiring and converting customers, it’s essential to keep them loyal and engaged. Achieving this depends on delivering consistent, seamless experiences across every brand and channel touchpoint—from websites, mobile apps, and smart TVs to call centers and physical stores. It also means ensuring customer data is protected and secure at every step of the way.

When customers are happy, loyalty, additional purchases, and referrals—all of which are crucial to driving business growth—are bound to follow. CIAM helps with this by enabling you to:

• Create consistent omni-channel experiences across multiple subsidiaries, properties, and brands.
• Deliver convenient self-service capabilities such as painless password resets, which are a common cause of abandoned accounts.
• Enable top-notch customer support by keeping customer identity data in sync across downstream systems. 

Outside of optimized experiences, customers are also increasingly focused on privacy and how brands store and use their data. Feeling reassured about a company’s ability to protect sensitive information is a huge driver in customer trust and retention. This is something we’ve seen at Major League Baseball (MLB). By leveraging Okta and our deep integration with OneTrust, MLB is able to remain compliant with privacy regulations and abide by their customers’ data choices, all while delighting them with frictionless digital experiences across a variety of channels.

These are just a few examples of how the right CIAM solution can help fuel business growth. Overall, CIAM is a powerful technology that can enable your company to create great digital experiences that drive customer acquisitions, conversions, and retention.

Discover how CIAM can support revenue-generating initiatives for your business, or get in touch to learn more about how Okta can support your organization.