5 Ways a Modern Customer Identity Solution Can Help Your Business

In this post, we explore five ways a modern CIAM solution can help improve your customer experience and operational efficiency while strengthening your defences against surging cyberthreats.

Robust security and seamless user-experience rarely go hand in hand.

So if you want to build exceptional digital experiences for your customers, you need to prioritise both.

Investing in a Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) solution will allow you to modernise your registration and authentication experiences while at the same time protecting customers from fraud and risk.

But where do you start?

To build, or not to build? That is the first question every technology  leader must answer when creating a CIAM strategy for their business. And while we’ve already discussed the many disadvantages of taking the do-it-yourself approach in our previous post, here we explain all the advantages you can gain by partnering with a modern CIAM solution provider like Okta.

#1 Keeps customers happy

Customers today are more demanding than ever before. They want secure, frictionless, personalised digital experiences that make them feel valued and safe – and they expect the brands they use to meet those demands without question. Failure to do so can quickly drive customers away, with a recent PwC report revealing that 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after just one bad experience.

As well as eliminating friction from the login process with secure Single Sign-on (SSO) and Multifactor Authentication (MFA), Okta’s CIAM solution also allows your organisation to build a 360-degree view of every customer across all your apps and products. As a result, you can add a personal touch to every customer login and make the process as seamless and pleasurable for your customers as possible.

#2 Accelerates speed-to-market

Change is constant. Whether it's the emergence of an agile, new competitor in your marketplace or the impact of a global pandemic, the world will always provide challenges that your business needs to respond to.

If your digital touchpoints are going to adapt quickly with evolving customer expectations then you need a customer identity solution that can support speed-to-market.

Building your own CIAM solutions into your apps, websites, and portals can be a complex and lengthy process that slows down speed-to-market. 

With a modern CIAM provider like Okta however, our out-the-box solutions are easy to configure and fast to deploy, meaning you can quickly embed CIAM into your customer experiences without investing in the time and resources it takes to build a solution from scratch.

#3 Centralises access management

In the new digital world, delivering omnichannel experiences that allow your customers to seamlessly connect with your organisation across all apps, websites, and portals is critical. Yet, managing fragmented user identities across multiple IT systems can create many complex challenges that negatively impact customer experience, operational efficiency, and security.

By centralising identity and access management across all your IT systems, both on-premises and in the cloud, CIAM creates a single source of truth across all identities for all users, groups, and devices. As well as reducing administrative overhead, this single-pane-of-glass interface allows you to manage all the different access policies, group memberships, and security policies in a central location to ensure consistency, reduce configuration errors, prevent security gaps, and maintain compliance. 

#4 Delivers state-of-the-art security 

While building a CIAM solution in-house may seem like a logical investment, there are many hidden risks to consider. Alongside the huge costs of maintaining the platform yourself, the rising threat of ransomware and other cyberthreats that target weaknesses within the identity layer is becoming more dangerous and difficult to detect by the day.

By choosing a modern CIAM solution from a trusted provider like Okta, however, all that responsibility is lifted off your shoulders. Our seasoned identity experts ensure your customer identity platform is regularly updated with all the latest security features, while SSO, MFA, and extensive analytics increase network visibility and help eliminate credential-based attacks before they happen. 

#5 Minimises downtime

Alongside security and convenience, customers today prioritise reliability above all else. They want to be able to seamlessly login to your products and services from whichever device or location they wish, and they expect the freedom to do so whenever they please. Downtime is unacceptable, and customers will quickly take their business elsewhere if they feel a brand is unable to meet their expectations.

By partnering with a modern CIAM provider, you don’t have to worry about redundant infrastructure letting you or your customers down. Okta, for example, offers a 99.99% uptime for every customer, and ensure you can quickly scale your CIAM solution across your organisation with minimal disruption.

Want to know more?

If you’re eager to learn more about the advantages of partnering with a CIAM solution provider like Okta, or if you have any questions about any of the topics covered above, please feel free to download a copy of CIAM For Dummies or arrange a quick call with one of our friendly CIAM experts here.