Driving retail growth with Okta and AWS
Picture the scene …
You enter a store and are greeted by a personal shopper asking how they can assist you today. You tell them you’re shopping for a special occasion, and they immediately curate a tailored selection of items that perfectly suit your tastes. As you browse, the assistant provides thoughtful suggestions and tips. It’s as if they know your preferences better than you do. Checking out is swift and smooth. Wouldn’t you be tempted to come back another time?
Such seamless and personalized shopping experiences were once the preserve of exclusive high-end stores. Now, they’re the gold standard for online shopping — made possible by cloud computing and improved data analytics, and soon to be turbocharged by the power of generative AI.
Consumers today expect smooth, Amazon-style experiences from every retailer. Because of this, Okta has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer a powerful modern security solution with Identity, engagement, and personalization tools. Through this partnership, Okta and AWS give retailers the ability to enhance the customer experience, drive organizational efficiencies, and gain a competitive edge.
Okta is built on AWS infrastructure. AWS takes care of the security of the cloud, while Okta helps secure applications and data in the cloud. That leaves retailers free to focus on building awesome customer experiences. Today, thousands of Okta customers leverage more than 25 AWS integrations available on the Okta Integration Network. This close working relationship allows for more seamless product integrations, making personalization, security, and Identity even easier for retailers to implement.
Here’s a deeper look at why this partnership is so powerful:
Personalization drives business growth
Eighty percent of consumers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Crucially, companies that excel at personalized experiences deliver 40% more revenue than the industry average. These consumers don’t just convert, they come back time and again and drive long-term growth for your business.
What’s stopping businesses from delivering these tailored services? Too often, it’s a fragmented approach to Identity. Customers faced with clunky login and checkout flows, repeated requests for information they’ve given before, and uninspiring, impersonal shopping experiences are unlikely to trust you with their future business.
Smoother shopping starts with Identity
To deliver the seamless, personalized services that customers want, a unified approach to Customer Identity is essential. A modern solution ensures a convenient, frictionless shopping experience, while helping to keep users’ data private and secure.
By centralizing your customer data, you gain a single source of truth for every user, giving you a comprehensive picture of their journey and interactions. You can deliver consistent login experiences, ensuring customers are remembered across all your channels and brands. And you can harness data to craft personalized recommendations and upsell suggestions that enhance customers’ experiences and drive revenue.
Of course, such fluid experiences cannot come at the cost of security. Retailers are often prime targets for cyber attacks, and you don’t want it to be your business that customers read about in the news. With bots now accounting for nearly half of global online traffic, fake and fraudulent sign-ups are a growing concern, as they skew valuable data while providing entry points for cyber attackers. A Customer Identity platform can mitigate risk by providing strong Identity verification during sign-up, including two-factor authentication. This way, tight security is balanced with a user-friendly experience that also helps you comply with data protection regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and PCI DSS.
GenAI raises the retail bar
While retailers work to protect and personalize their online offerings, generative AI is taking them to the next level. McKinsey estimates GenAI could deliver $660 billion in additional value in the retail industry annually. Tools like Amazon Q allow retailers to harness data at scale, improving customer experiences with 24/7 chatbot help, personalized recommendations, conversational search, and virtual try-ons. These tools can analyze customer feedback and feed insights into new ideas and campaigns. And they can optimize operations by improving inventory management, increasing supply chain agility, automating coding, and speeding up innovation.
Retail has evolved dramatically over the decades, but the fundamentals of what customers want remain the same: Help me choose, understand my tastes, make it easy for me to buy, and earn my trust. By collaborating with AWS, a leader in secure cloud infrastructure, we’re helping retailers exceed consumer expectations, while paving the way for transformative experiences.
