How CIAM benefits your customers and impacts your bottom-line

CIAM (Customer Identity & Access Management) helps organisations improve customer experience by bringing together capabilities for next-level UX, security, and customer analytics in a single solution. CIAM is deployed either as-a-service or on-premises and embeds into applications and web services via interconnected Identity APIs.

Below, we’ll summarise how a modern CIAM solution positively impacts your customers to drive both the top-line and bottom-line.

CIAM from the perspective of your customer

CIAM, at its simplest, is about driving revenue. New revenue requires new customer conversions and deeper customer engagement, starting with the first time a customer uses your services.

Registration-as-a-Service

CIAM provides templated registration and login forms, usually supporting streamlined registration with support for pre-integrated digital Identity Providers like Facebook, Bank IDs, Government IDs, and more. Registration-as-a-Service makes it easy for developers to quickly build best-in-class forms and reduce the usual friction associated with signing up for new services.

 

Single identity across all your applications

Consider that your customers already have account and password fatigue before requiring them to create yet another account. By enabling Single Sign-On (SSO), your customers need only a single account and a single set of credentials to automatically login to all your services. Moving between applications becomes faster and easier, and customers can engage more deeply with your services.

 

Empower customers to own their identity data

CIAM allows customers to reset their passwords and manage their identity data and consent preferences. Not only does CIAM ensure identity data attributes stay up to date across all connected applications, it helps ensure your customer benefits from the privacy and consent regulations introduced in GDPR and the CCPA. Customers expect you to be a responsible steward of their identity data.

 

CIAM from the perspective of your organisation

Capture, proof & convert

CIAM solutions should support the use of existing digital identities from the dozens of Identity Providers (Google, Facebook, enterprise IDs, Bank IDs, Government IDs). Form abandonment will be reduced when customers use the ‘sign in with…’ capability, and depending on the assurance strength of the ID, the service provider can trust that a new customer is who they say they are.

 

For situations that require the proofing of customer identities but the customer does not have an appropriate existing digital identity, CIAM should also support real-time verification of real-world identities.

 

Authenticate your customers and permit access to the right resources

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) builds on the traditional username and password method of authentication by requiring successful verification of additional form factors such as TOTP (time-based one time PINs sent to the customer’s mobile device) or biometric credentials. MFA is increasingly required by many online service providers, partly driven by the need to reduce identity fraud and meet compliance regulation, and partly due to the improved usability of modern MFA solutions. CIAM supports many MFA form types from multiple specialist vendors.

Once authenticated, CIAM can manage the many authorisation rules that control who can access what resource (and potentially when).

 

Get a better view of your customer

CIAM helps organisations eliminate risky, overlapping identity data silos by using scalable and secure storage solutions for customer identity data and associated attributes, either in the cloud or on-premises. This centralised view of identity data, consent choices, and custom preferences offer deep analytical insight via integrated BI tools.

 

Digitise expensive, resource-heavy workflows

Customer IAM capabilities such as credential self-management, i.e. allowing customers to reset their own passwords and keep their own identity data attributes up to date, dramatically reduce the burden on the helpdesk and keep contact data across connections applications fresh and accurate.

Organisations should digitise complex admin-based workflows to make an improved impact on bottom-lines. CIAM solutions that support multi-level delegation of authority allow admin actions to be delegated onwards to other individuals (and even other organisations). Digitising such workflows can reduce costs by as high as 99%.

 

Scale, scale, scale

Enterprise, or workforce IAM, solutions are used to manage thousands of employees. CIAM solutions need to manage millions of customers. Modern CIAM solutions are designed to do exactly that – manage millions of users securely and without performance impact across many different business use cases.

 

Get applications to market faster, make them smarter

Any identity management solution should support essential identity standards like OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML, and others. Building standards-based solutions with their regional nuances can be complicated, with steep learning curves for developers. Embedding capabilities from a proven CIAM solution reduces the time developers need to understand and implement identity management. This helps keep developers focused on the core business and gets the application to market faster.

 

In summary, CIAM Business benefits

• Delivers outstanding customer experiences
• Avoids identity data breaches
• Reduces operational and support costs
• Keeps your development team focused

Today, CIAM has become much more than just Identity & Access Management for customers. It’s become an essential business tool that will protect your business and give you a competitive advantage. It will win you more customers, give you valuable insight into buyer behaviours, protect valuable identity data, and scale to millions of customers.

 

To learn more about CIAM and its suitability for your organisation, download Ubisecure’s whitepaper on evaluating the value of Customer IAM.

Ubisecure offers a free 30 day CIAM IDaaS Trial, or you can sign up for a demo, or get in touch with our identity experts.