Customer Identity And Access Management: Everything You Need To Know (FAQs)
What Is Customer Identity And Access Management (CIAM)?
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is a subset of the broader Identity and Access Management (IAM) category. CIAM solutions are a type of security technology that supports organizations in managing their customer identities, enhancing both the security and the overall experience for customers. These solutions go beyond user identity, access control to provide comprehensive, integrated systems for compliance, privacy protection, and anti-fraud. More advanced solutions can collect customer behavior data and use AI and analytics, alongside customer relationship management (CRM) tools, to deliver a highly personalized customer experience.
Why Is CIAM So Important?
A smooth and seamless customer experience is extremely important, especially today when consumers have such high expectations for navigating online spaces. Anything that impedes their use of your site risks pushing them towards a competitor, while anything that improves the experience for customers goes a long way to ensure they return again and again.
For organizations looking to provide online retail, news, financial services, and any other service, CIAM solutions can help ensure that the registration process is smooth and user friendly, the online experience is seamless and easy to navigate, and the likelihood of positive engagement – for example, customers subscribing or making a purchase – is as high as it can be.
Important Features Of A CIAM Solution
Any customer identity and access initiative must be supported by a solid security framework. It should enable this frictionless security, while making sure there is seamless interaction between users, systems, and devices, for an optimal customer experience.
Some essential features that make up a robust CIAM framework include:
Scalability
A growing customer base is what every business strives for and keeping up with that growth is vital to maintaining it. While you want as many customers as possible using your CIAM solution, the numbers can be difficult to predict (unlike an IAM solution, whose user base does not fluctuate nearly as much).
Your CIAM solution will have to deal with peaks and dips as your business grows with the introduction of new services or changes in demand for your service. It is essential that your CIAM solution has the capacity to scale according to changing customer needs, and to be able to handle users across various web and mobile channels, while ensuring performance and user experience across these channels does not suffer.
Flexibility
IAM systems are not known for being very flexible. Any changes – influenced by modern IT trends – tend to come onstream slowly, where the philosophy of making incremental adjustments over time rules. For CIAM systems, making changes needs to be quick and straightforward, with configuration requirements that are simple and easy to implement. Otherwise, customers will be annoyed that their OS has changed, and be resistant to upgrade again.
CIAM solutions cater to organizations’ need to keep on top of emerging customers trends, fluctuating numbers of customers, and changing industry standards. They need to remain relevant to the newest technological environments, so flexibility is vital.
Integration
You will want your CIAM solution to integrate effectively and seamlessly with as many channels as possible. This means that however a customer engages with you, they will have the same experience. An effective CIAM solution helps to create a unified customer profile which applications can use to provide users with a consistent, multi-channel experience that is tailored to each customers unique behaviors. The customer data used to achieve this tailored approach is critical to the business, so any CIAM solution must allow for integration with other types of solutions like CMS, CRM, CDP, etc.
Privacy And Security
CIAM solutions should provide data encryption, alert users of risky actions, and keep a record of user and administrator activity; this is in addition to managing the security levels of authentication mechanisms. For privacy, there are a range of regulations – including CCPA and GDPR – that organizations may be required to comply with. A CIAM solutions enables each user to review and accept the privacy policy of the organization and decide whether the privacy options offered are acceptable. By doing this, organizations can collect and use data in accordance with individual preference across applications, ensuring they fulfill any regulatory requirements and maintaining user trust.
Adaptive Authentication
Consumers have come to expect ease of access and convenience from any service, so ensuring your authentication solution offers both of those things is very important. Current authentication methods include Single Sign-On (SSO) through shared entities (like Google or Facebook), passwordless authentication, or multi-factor authentication (MFA) utilizing one-time passcodes (OTP), biometric data, and smart cards.
As well as improving convenience, strong authentication may also be a requirement for certain operations or use of data, for security reasons. A CIAM solution should allow for an adaptive approach to authentication – user should be able to authenticate according to their own preferences and behaviors. Users should also be given enough information regarding their account security to better-inform fraud detection efforts.
Data Collection And Analysis
It is important for organizations to make tactical business decisions based on relevant data. The better informed you are about your customers’ habits and wants, the more accurately you can curate their personalized experience, and keep them invested in your service. The data collected by CIAM solutions supports this through facilitating easy analysis by grouping customers based on their behavior and attributes. You can identify what related services or products a customer might be interested in.
This also lets you keep track of the number of active customers and leads to both the creation of new services and marketing and sales campaigns that are supported by data. According to Microsoft, leveraging customer behavior data to generate insights lead to organizations outperforming their peers by 85% in sales growth.
Summary
Businesses live or die based on customer satisfaction, especially nowadays when markets are saturated with high quality competitors that your customers could just as easily go to in order to have their needs met. Even in situations where the product or services offered are niche or out-of-the-box enough not to have a lot of competitors, it is important to not become complacent – if customers feel let down by your business, you can lose them.
A solid, well-implemented CIAM solution works to support organizations in managing their customer bases, providing them with a positive user experience while maintaining security and data privacy well enough to establish brand trust and keep their market reputation strong.
