Customer IAM (CIAM) from the Customer Perspective
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is an essential part of businesses nowadays. From the customer point of view, CIAM helps to improve the experience with smooth onboarding, better personalization, omnichannel experience and better privacy controls.
In this blog, we will look at how various CIAM capabilities are involved when considering the journey of the customer.
In typical customer experience management terms, customer journey can be generally mapped to stages like,
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Service
Awareness stage is the very first step where a customer interacts with a certain brand. At this stage customers get to know about the product or the service offered by the business which leads to access to the company website or contents in other platforms like social media.
Customer’s interactions of this stage usually happen at an anonymous level without sharing any user attribute. Hence the involvement of CIAM will be minimal as no Identity information is available of the customer in this stage. But it’s important to make use of products like web analytics to preserve the interest of the customer which can be beneficial in a later stage.
At the Consideration stage, customers will have more focused needs, so it would have more engagement by downloading data sheets, following product demos\trials etc. At this level usually one or two attributes of the customers get captured. Depending on the prominence of the attributes, this would be the starting point of representing the customer as a (lite) user account in the CIAM system. These accounts don’t have any credential associated since customers haven’t gone through any onboarding process.
At this level the inbound and outbound provisioning capabilities of the CIAM product plays a key role. Let’s say a customer downloads a catalog from the product website by providing its email, then the website would create a lite account in the CIAM system using a standard provisioning protocol like SCIM. Then the CIAM will (outbound) provision that user account to the different marketing tools like Hubspot, CRMs like Salesforce or web analytics like Mixpanel.
Another interesting integration would be co-relating the lite account with the WebAnalytics. This helps to get more insights on the user like geo location, interested content that the customer looks at during the Awareness stage etc.. These can be used to provide more relevant, personalized information to the customer.
Purchase stage is the stage that has the most attention in many organizations. Depending on the laws and regulations it might be crucial to have the verified user details, but it’s important to have the customer registration and onboarding process to be as simple as possible.
One way to do this is minimizing the mandatory information requested from the customer. This can be done by auto filling information that is already associated with the lite account. Another aspect is using progressive profiling so that the customer has to provide additional details only when they access a specific service that requires that details.
Having to maintain tons of accounts\credentials is a main headache from the customer perspective, hence giving the ability to bring your own ID (BYOID) helps to simplify the registration. This will also help reduce the self service or call center interactions in later stages as it will reduce the need of having to recover your account just because you couldn’t remember the username or the password that you used to register to this system.
Having direct integrations with Identity Verifications services like Evident ID in the CIAM solution, reduces the overhead of providing various documents or having to go through a manual process to verify information of a customer like a proof of citizenship, insurance validity etc.
Service stage is the most important stage of many consumer businesses. Experience of this stage determines whether existing customers become a champion or the detractor for the brand.
From the CIAM standpoint, users should have seamless access to any product or service they consume. If there are multiple services involved, basic things like the ability to consume both services with the same account, having SSO among multiple applications has become must have capabilities. Strong authentication with additional factors is also a need when accessing sensitive applications. Adaptive authentication also plays a key role in balancing convenience over the security.
Having measurements like captcha, account locking, risk based authentication gives more assurance to protect customers’ accounts from the malicious parties.
This leads to the need of another vital requirement — self service. Customer should be able to update its review of its privacy preferences like using its email for different activities, change associated profile information like updating the contact information. Also, customer would adjust their security profile by configuring recovery mechanisms, registering trusted devices for login.
Data portability and ability to deregister also getting more demand with the advance of privacy regulations across the world.
During the service stage, the business might also go through different changes like merging or acquisition of different brands. Changes like these shouldn’t affect any drastic changes of customer experience and the CIAM solution should facilitate to cater these changes in incremental manner.
Having things like loyalty programs would increase the engagement of the customer. Loyal customers might opt for early access of new products and also give more accurate feedback which can be utilized in AB testing on any product or service changes.
As the CIAM solution is well connected with every system that involves the customer, it enables to generate more behavioural data which can be used to predict and determine the possible interests which suits for them. Even with any unprecedented incidents, this information helps to get better informed decisions and the CIAM solution itself helps to quickly adapt those changes with minimal interruption to the customer.
In conclusion capabilities of a CIAM system like,
- User Onboarding & Verification
- User & Attribute Management
- Strong & Adaptive authentication
- Privacy & Consent management
- Customer Self Care Services
- Integration with Business Apps & Tools
- Analytics & Fraud Detection
helps the customer to have a perfect relationship with the brands.
References:
[1] https://searchcustomerexperience.techtarget.com/definition/customer-experience-management-CEM-or-CXM
[2] https://medium.facilelogin.com/what-is-customer-iam-ciam-9f3d74c9632a
[3] https://wso2.com/solutions/ciam/
[2] https://hbr.org/2007/02/understanding-customer-experience
