Today, when one of your products or services catches a customer’s attention, their first thought is, “Where can I buy this online?” Your digital channels have become the primary touchpoint for establishing new customer relationships, and it’s crucial to make a good first impression if you want those relationships to flourish.

The problem is, it’s all too easy to stumble at that first hurdle. If you force customers to go through a multi-step process to register and log in before they complete their purchase, then every step will sap their energy and give them an opportunity to reconsider their purchase. 

On the other hand, if you don’t do enough due diligence to confirm your customer’s identity, you’re making it easy for fraudsters to take advantage of your business—and potentially putting genuine customers at risk of account takeover and identity theft. 

It looks like a catch-22 for customer experience—a lose-lose choice between friction and fraud. However, there is another way. The right customer identity and access management (CIAM) strategy can help you steer a safe course to secure, stress-free customer experiences.

CIAM allows businesses to securely capture and manage customers’ identity and profile data and control what applications, services, and information users have access to. 

The traditional approach to CIAM has tended to force the customer to provide as much information as possible at the point of registration and require them to log in with a username and password for every session. Taking this approach usually forces businesses to make user experience tradeoffs to secure how customers engage with their brand online.    

Modern approaches to CIAM enable businesses to identify who their customers are and what applications they should have access to in a way that doesn’t require compromising convenience for security. By continuously assessing the trustworthiness of each customer’s identity throughout their session, businesses can dynamically adjust the level of authentication required based on real-time risk assessments to make security visible only when absolutely necessary. This approach allows customers to securely engage with digital properties without encountering unnecessary friction. 

CIAM can also help you streamline the end-to-end customer journey by making it easier to introduce single sign-on (SSO) for customers across all your digital properties, prompt customers for multi-factor authentication (MFA) for additional security only when necessary, and ultimately move towards secure, convenient passwordless authentication experiences.

CIAM elevates the customer experience (CX) by simultaneously reducing friction and building trust.

Reduce Friction

With CIAM, you no longer need to push every customer through the same rigid authentication processes when they visit your site.

For example, if they’re registering for the first time, you don’t necessarily need to ask them to enter all their personal data immediately—you could just ask them to provide their email address and set a password and then let them browse your site to their heart’s content. Then, at the point when they decide to place their first order, you can ask them for their address and payment details. At any given point in their journey, you’re only asking them for the information you actually need, so they can focus on their shopping experience rather than filling in forms.

Similarly, when an existing customer wants to log into your site, you can make smarter decisions about how many authentication hoops you should make them jump through. For example, if they logged in successfully an hour ago on the same PC with the same IP address, and their mouse movements and typing patterns are the same as they were before, you might decide they don’t need to enter their password again.

Essentially, CIAM allows you to adjust the level of friction in your authentication experience appropriately so that customers don’t feel they’re being bothered unnecessarily.

Build Trust

When we talk about adjusting friction, the key word is “appropriately”. Zero friction isn’t always the right answer from a security perspective—and it’s not always what customers want, either.

For example, imagine you get a login request that seems to be coming from an existing customer, but the IP address shows that they are in a different country and using an unknown device. In that case, you might decide to send a multi-factor authentication request to make sure the customer is who they say they are.

Let’s say the request does come from a genuine customer—perhaps they’re traveling overseas, and they’ve borrowed a friend’s device because their own smartphone won’t connect to the local network. In this situation, receiving an additional security challenge doesn’t feel like unnecessary friction—it’s actually reassuring for the customer because it shows them that you’re taking their account security seriously. 

Only asking for the authentication that you need, and always asking for authentication when you need it, are two sides of the same coin. If you can prove to customers that the friction added to the experience is always proportionate to the situation, you’ll find it much easier to win their trust.

The ultimate effects of using CIAM to improve customer experience can be highly beneficial for your business. Effective use of CIAM enables you to:

Boost Customer Acquisition and Retention 

Businesses can acquire more customers with CIAM and progressive profiling to streamline the registration process by asking for information overtime rather than forcing new customers to fill out a long sign-up form at the very beginning. Plus, reducing friction during login when existing customers return to any digital property can help ensure that businesses retain their customers.  

Increase Revenue

By using progressive profiling, businesses can get to know their customers better while building rich user profiles they can use to tailor experiences across every digital property. They can use customer preferences to curate cross-sell and up-sell offers to open up revenue-generating opportunities. Getting more customers to complete their product selection and purchasing journeys means more successful transactions and more revenue for your business.

Strengthen Customer Loyalty

By enforcing appropriate security measures in every situation, CIAM shows your customers that you are a trustworthy steward of their accounts and personal data. This increases the likelihood of repeat business, reduces the risk of account abandonment, and acts as a disincentive for churn.

Reduce Customer Support Costs

Effective CIAM gives customers more options for authenticating with your site, which means they are less likely to fail security challenges or get locked out of their accounts. This in turn reduces the volume of calls to your customer service center, cutting operational costs and enabling agents to focus on adding value.

Mitigate Security, Privacy, and Fraud Risks

By replacing outdated perimeter-based identity checks with continuous real-time identity analytics, CIAM makes your customer-facing systems more secure. This not only protects your business from cyberattacks and fraud, it also protects your customers’ data and reduces the risk of financial and reputational damage from data breaches.

PingOne for Customers is our best-in-class CIAM solution. Visit our product page to find out more about how it can help you reduce friction, build trust, and create delightful digital experiences that keep customers coming back for more.