The 10 Step Customer Identity Strategy Checklist
Do you know exactly what it takes to build a Customer Identity strategy? Read our 10-step checklist to help guide you to CIAM success.
In a world where customer experience has overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator, investing in customer identity and access management (CIAM) is a wise choice for any forward-thinking business. But what makes a great CIAM platform…great? And how can you successfully choose one solution over another?
To help ensure you make the right choice and successfully plan and implement the right customer identity solution for your organisation, here is a ten-step checklist of all the things you should consider when building your CIAM strategy:
#1 Understand your customers’ frustrations
When it comes to improving the customer experience, CIAM can be a powerful tool – but only if you know which areas need fixing. Considering this, be sure to note everything that drives customer frustration within your organisation – from slow registration processes and security concerns to lack of integration with modern apps and tools – before you start searching for a CIAM platform capable of solving them.
#2 Set your customer experience goals
Set some clear goals regarding the experience you want to offer your customers. How do your digital interactions set you apart from your competitors?
When considering CIAM specifically you should be asking questions like: Do we want to provide seamless, secure access to all your apps with a unique, branded login experience? Do we want to provide a fully omni-channel experience across all of our channels?
#3 Set your long-term business objectives
As well as deciding what type of customer experience your organisation aims to deliver, you should also be clear on what you want your organisation to achieve over the next 5-10 years. Is growth into new markets a key ambition? Do you plan to launch a new product or service? Can the CIAM solution you’re considering support these ambitions consistently?
#4 Define your security strategy
As cybercrime continues to soar, assuring your customers that their data is safe is more important than ever before. To help maintain customer loyalty and peace of mind, consider what steps your organisation can take to deliver more secure, compliant access experiences across all channels both now and in the future.
#5 Prioritise your CIAM needs
While the right CIAM solution will add many benefits to your organisation, it’s important to prioritise which CIAM features your organisation needs most. Consider everything from user experience and data privacy to digital transformation and business requirement – then use your answers to decide which CIAM solution best meets your needs.
#6 Calculate the cost of building CIAM in-house
While building CIAM in-house is an option many business leaders will likely consider, the short-term costs and long-term costs of doing so are astoundingly high. For more information on why this is so, read our recent blog on Why building CIAM is more difficult than you think where we explain all the challenges and solutions in full.
#7 Find an out-the-box CIAM solution from a leading provider
Instead of trying to solve all the challenges of building a CIAM solution yourself, instead look for a CIAM expert like Okta that can build, manage, and maintain a world-class customer identity platform on your behalf. This way, you get all benefits of customer identity without the hassle and can focus more of your time and resources on strengthening other areas of your organisation.
#8 Deploy CIAM at scale
After you’ve found a CIAM solution that meets all your business needs, you can start deploying it across all your customer facing apps, websites, and portals. To ensure deployment runs as smoothly and swiftly as possible, remember to choose a CIAM solution that offers many out-the-box integrations with leading cloud and on-premises solutions providers.
#9 Achieve full CIAM maturity
To help you get the best possible return on your CIAM investment, we have provided a roadmap for all the tools and processes you should adopt to achieve full CIAM maturity as your organisation moves ahead. Discover what CIAM maturity is, what benefits it can bring to your business, and how to achieve it in our CIAM Maturity Framework.
#10 Put identity at the heart of every customer journey
With the right CIAM solution in place, setting your organisation apart from the competition with world class customer experiences should be simple. For more information on how you can achieve this goal and to learn how Okta is can help accelerate your journey towards full CIAM maturity and future success, reach out to of our friendly experts here.