At LoginRadius, we are passionate about creating efficient processes to provide seamless online login experiences. At the KuppingerCole Consumer Identity World event in Seattle, our CEO, Rakesh Soni, gave an insightful presentation on the importance of Marketing and Engineering collaboration to achieve this goal. In essence, working together maximize's each team's strength by eliminating each team's limitations. His presentation can be downloaded here and you can read the summary below. 

What is Consumer Identity World?

Consumer Identity World is a three-day annual conference hosted by KuppingerCole for leaders who secure consumer digital identities. Topics for discussion often include Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) strategies, customer privacy and consent management, and methods for improving customer experience.

KuppingerCole is a renowned, independent analyst organization that specializes in neutral advice, thought leadership, and practical relevance regarding CIAM, as well as IAM. The latter acronym stands for Identity & Access Management. Simply put, IAM is a platform built for managing and securing employee identities, rather than customer identities. More information about the difference between IAM vs. CIAM can be found here.

Improving security and service for customer digital identities

Throughout the three days at Consumer Identity World, attendees networked and learned about the latest news in data security, privacy regulations, and login authentication. Our CEO, Rakesh, contributed to this conversation with a presentation on the vital need for Marketing and Engineering teams to unite. By combining the skills and insights of both teams, companies can better serve today’s modern digital user. 

Characteristics of the modern digital user

Society is constantly becoming more digitalized. Online services completely changed consumer behavior—we shop, pay bills, and call rides online. So, when businesses provide services, they should understand the characteristics of today’s digital users. Here are a few:

• Digital users are aware of what new technology can do (SuperOffice)
• They expect a frictionless experience (Whitepages Pro)
• They prefer self-service over human assistance (Whitepages Pro)
• They expect an omnichannel experience.

Rakesh also stressed that digital users want quick, hassle-free service when: 

• Arriving at a website—pages should load quickly 
• Registering or requesting forgotten passwords 
• Logging in or authenticating—systems should not crash

Challenge: Marketing & Engineering teams are so different

Marketing Team Strengths

• Messaging
• Visuals
• UX

Marketing Team Weaknesses

• Software technicalities
• Influence on website speed

Engineering Team Strengths

• Customer identity data input/output 
• Web development

Engineering Team Weaknesses

• Addressing Customer Experience (CX) 
• Improving and implementing CX 

Solution: Marketing and Engineering teams can collaborate.

 By combining their different skills and insights two teams become a stronger whole.

Initiating collaboration

There are two main ways to join Marketing and Engineering teams, so you can create a modern online experience. Here’s how your Executive Team can help implement this.

The first way is for the Executive team to create a culture of collaboration between Marketing and Engineering. 

Make it clear that they both have the same goal:

Both teams want to provide a frictionless online experience for customers. 

Next, highlight each team’s strengths and how the other team contributes to the overall goal. Management should ensure their teams feel empowered and excited to work with each other. 

Additionally, the Executive team should seek to build a team of experts. This team should be responsible for developing and maintaining a high-performance system. 

Vital features of this system include:

• Unified experience across different brands under a parent organization
• Quick API response time of less than 400 ms
• Handle large peak loads of 100,000 logins/second
• Guarantee 99.99% system uptime
• Send password reset emails in less than 3 seconds
• Load pages in less than 750 ms

Your collaborative dream team should include individuals who specialize in identity, DevOps, third-party integrations, UX, and consumer behaviour. They should continue to research and develop a high performing customer ID and experience engine. Once this in place, this team of experts should work to continuously maintain it. 

Conclusion

Creating collaboration between Marketing and Engineering can greatly improve online services. This culture and structure of working together is key in meeting these needs and evolving in the future. And it is up to the Executive team to ensure that this collaboration is successful. 
Click here to download a PDF of the full presentation.