What is CIAM?

November 30, 2020

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Customer Experience is King

Providing a great customer experience is what every company aspires to. Enjoying a great buying journey or experiencing quick support resolution means customers will buy more, stay loyal, and promote your brand to their friends. As businesses across every market segment engage in new mobile and digital transformation efforts, they must also ensure that they offer omni-channel customer experiences that minimize friction, maximize efficiency, and ensure the security of the customer’s account as well as the company’s systems.

In today’s digital world, companies must differentiate themselves by their ability to leverage technology that allows their customers to maintain real, seamless, and secure connections.

Walker Information, a customer experience firm specializing in customer retention and growth strategies, published research that predicts that by the end of 2020, customer experience will be the key brand differentiator, surpassing price and product quality. If companies fail to satisfy their clients, it can lead to significant losses and consumer disconnect.

According to PwC, the consulting firm, about 59% of American customers will stop patronizing a brand after several bad experiences, and about 17% after only one bad encounter.

What is CIAM?

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is a new discipline that helps an organization meet customer expectations for seamless experiences while ensuring security in their operations. CIAM helps an enterprise securely capture and manage customer identity and profile data, as well as control customer access to various enterprise applications and services. With CIAM, businesses can better manage customer identities, preferences, and profile information at scale. CIAM helps deliver secure, seamless login experiences for a company’s website, platforms, and other online services. These solutions also enable customers to self-register for services, log in, authenticate, and manage their own user profiles, including consent and other preferences.

Identity runs at the core of CIAM as it involves the secure verification of an individual as well as the collection, storage, and management of consumers’ digital identities. It also encompasses how businesses use this information to improve customer access to their digital services.

CIAM vs. IAM

While CIAM tackles the concept of identity management, it should not be confused with traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM).

CIAM and IAM share similar concepts, but their differences lie in their target users and technical capabilities.

IAM is an internal-facing enterprise solution that focuses on defining and managing the roles and access privileges of a company’s workforce, emphasizing the protection of company data, control of employee access to various systems and other corporate assets, and regulatory compliance. Enterprise security and the rights and privileges of the company’s workforce is the central concern of IAM.

In the workplace, inconveniences arising from security requirements are mostly expected and tolerated. On the other hand, customers chafe at remembering yet another password or going through a cumbersome authentication process to use online services

CIAM, therefore, serves an externally-oriented function and concentrates on managing customer identities and service access across multiple channels and systems. While enterprise security remains paramount in CIAM, it extends an extra sense of importance to delivering a good omni-channel customer experience.

Features of CIAM

CIAM simplifies the integration of identity management technologies into a business’s infrastructure.

An effective CIAM system includes numerous features that streamline operations from signup to login and other aspects of identity management.

Centralized Customer Management and Unified Customer Profiles

Today’s service delivery is not just confined to the brick and mortar store next door. Today, your customers engage with your brand across multiple channels including mobile apps, IoT, partner apps, IVR and phone apps, and much more. It is often a hassle for customers to create multiple identities across several applications. With CIAM, companies can reduce the number of customers’ identities or even allow a single identity to be used in various service channels so that you can provide consistent multi-channel experiences and personalized interactions to your customers.

Many companies already implement Single Sign-On (SSO) for a more convenient omni-channel experience and a centralized means of managing and controlling customer data. SSO allows users to log into one platform and utilize a single set of credentials to ‘seamlessly’ log into other channels.

Low-Friction Authentication Processes

CIAM supports the integration of various authentication solutions that reduce friction at every point, from registration to login and access, without compromising security.

Many Customer identity management solutions include multi-factor authentication (MFA) for a more secure and convenient means of verification. MFA utilizes a combination of credentials to authenticate someone’s identity, such as app-generated numeric codes or including biometric modalities like facial recognition. Having these additional layers of security protects a system from account takeover

Scalability

Customer Identity access management solutions enable enterprises to support service and product delivery across multiple customer touchpoints, all the while collecting a vast amount of data from their customers. With CIAM, businesses can quickly adapt to ever-changing customer demands, while continuing to provide a problem-free experience at any time.

The Benefits of CIAM

CIAM helps companies meet today’s consumer expectations for more convenient and efficient service access, thus providing the company with a competitive advantage over other market players.

Moreover, by utilizing robust identity authentication solutions in CIAM, enterprises better protect their customer’s accounts, valuable information, and privacy while ensuring adherence to regulatory compliance.

When businesses effectively satisfy the demand for an excellent customer experience and enhanced security, they can acquire and retain more clients, build lasting and loyal relationships, increase sales, and drive revenue generation.

Conclusion

Today’s tech-savvy and demanding consumers have challenged firms to shore up their technology to deliver seamless customer service. Enterprises must ensure that they satisfy their clients’ needs, or they will face adverse outcomes like consumer disconnect and revenue loss.

To meet these needs, firms should implement effective Customer Identity and Access Management that maximizes scalability, the use of verified and unified identities, centralized access management, and trusted and streamlined authentication processes.

Verified™ by authID is an identity authentication solution that can easily be integrated into CIAM systems. It utilizes facial biometric technology for secure multi-factor authentication, enabling frictionless identity authentication when accessing services, and ensuring enhanced account and transaction security. authID also enables passwordless authentication to streamline login and reduce fraudulent account takeover to reduce risk throughout your enterprise.

Schedule a Demo with authID

authID.ai is a provider of an Identity Authentication platform that delivers a suite of secure, mobile, biometric identity solutions, available to any vertical, anywhere. authID‘s solutions enable enterprises to maximize their Customer Identity and Access Management capabilities, benefiting both clients and the business. Contact authID today at 1 (516) 778-5639 or click here to schedule a demo.