Identity and Access Management (IAM) can enable digitalization, and, at the same time, comprehensive identity management can prevent cyber threats.
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions are specially tailored to manage external identities and can quickly enhance business opportunities, customer engagement, and provide tangible benefits.
This article will explore some of the instant and key benefits offered when using a CIAM solution.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is a subset of IAM, focusing on securely managing the identities of people needing access to corporate websites, web portals, and webshops. CIAM also controls customer access to applications and services.
The best CIAM solutions provide multiple features, including: self-service customer registration, self-service account management, consent and preference management, single sign-on (SSO), and multi-factor authentication (MFA). The best in class CIAM solutions provide a secure but seamless user experience across any device a customer uses, which helps in strengthening brand engagement.
CIAM solutions provide templated, low-code and no-code registration flows for customers. The registration process is complete with pre-built, digital identity providers such as Google and Facebook.
In addition, custom identity providers can be integrated to suit your needs. Identity providers external to your organization take on the responsibility for hosting user credentials and authenticating the user against the credentials that they manage, so you don’t have to. Developers can easily add the sign-in templates to your organization’s existing mobile and web applications.
In the age of the ‘Amazon effect’, we are all looking for the fastest and easiest way to purchase goods and services online, in exchange for a minimal amount of personal data from the customer. A great example of a CIAM solution is the ability to implement a single sign-on (SSO) solution across all of your products and services.
Customers need to only log in once but have the ability to access all products and services available to them. It’s even possible to integrate partner organizations. This reduces password fatigue and drop off.
Many organizations offer a free trial as an incentive for customers to buy their products and services. While interested in the product, many customers do not want to provide their full address and credit card details at the free trial stage.
That’s why numerous modern identity solutions now provide a sign-up flow for customers as leads, only requiring an email address to access a free trial. If the customer decides to make a purchase after the trial period, the required customer data can be requested to complete the transaction. This again reduces drop-off and creates a deeper connection with the customer, while still gathering an email contact point for the customer in the initial interaction.
CIAM identity services allow for a better method to track customers and their data in a central repository and remove the need for manual data extraction and analysis. Integrated BI tools are able to take this manual task off your hands. A single identity and SSO enables an accurate extraction of customer data, and SSO reduces the risk of overlapping data from different areas in your organization.
Gone are the days when customers were willing to email, let alone call a customer help desk, when an account was locked or a password was forgotten. CIAM solutions empower customers to quickly and easily unlock or reset passwords on their own accounts.
Additional identity checks can be implemented to ensure the user is who they say they are. It's also possible for end users to reset MFA factors (multi factor authentication), again bypassing the need for long wait times when requesting contact with customer services.
The digitization of manual workflows can reduce operational costs by up to 99%. There are many areas where CIAM solutions can help businesses to move away from manual workflows, which also helps in reducing error. The example above, of credential self-service, will significantly reduce the manual workload of an IT help desk, while driving customer satisfaction.
Low and no-code CIAM solutions can empower existing employees to make updates, such as customizing email notification and output to customers. CIAM solutions not only offer enhanced user experience to end customers, but also to employees with easy-to-use layouts and comprehensive training. Meaning there’s a reduced need to regularly recruit new employees, along with less resources required by the development team.
Cloud-based CIAM services allow for instant increases in capacity, which means there’s no need to worry when launching a new product, marketing campaign, or any other activity which causes a spike in customer engagement.
CIAM is designed to manage millions of customers without impacting performance, across many use cases. Many IDaaS providers also offer a pay-as-you-go identity service, so you do not have to pay for capacity you are not using.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be used in addition to the traditional username and password authentication method as a means to reduce identity fraud. MFA factors such as magic email links, SMS codes, Google Authenticator, or verification per mobile app are becoming increasingly popular.
Once a user is authenticated, CIAM can start the process of managing complex authorization rules to control access to products and services. On average, MFA is reported to decrease the chance of cyber attacks by 65% to 75%.
There are many more ways in which CIAM can help your business. It can be completely tailored to your organization’s needs. For further information or a free consultation, please contact [email protected] or fill in the contact form on our site.
Check out our CIAM solutions and other articles like Okta Workflows For Customer Identity and Exponential Growth in Cybercrimes.