How to Use Identity Management at Every Stage of the Customer Journey?

Introduction

Delivering a great customer experience is undoubtedly the need of the hour since customers across the globe are interacting with brands like Apple, Google, and Amazon, and they know what a great user experience feels like.

Hence, if you cannot cater to your customers with a similar experience, you lose the big game!

While leveraging personalization at every stage of the customer journey can enhance customer experience and unwind great opportunities, it also ensures returning customers and more referrals.

And to leverage the true potential of personalization and deliver a seamless experience throughout the customer journey, the role of identity management can’t be overlooked.

Identity management through a robust customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform personalizes marketing efforts, reduces fraud, and increases customer experience while supporting increased security and privacy.

CIAM stands at the center of any customer's journey. If you want to understand the characteristics of a successful customer journey, effective CIAM plays an important role. So, without proper CIAM, you will fail to monetize your customer’s value and keep them engaged.

This article highlights identity management throughout the customer journey and how it helps businesses streamline user experience backed with security.

What Role Does Identity Play in the Customer Journey?

Identity plays a crucial role in the customer journey as it helps to create a personalized and seamless experience for the customer.

The customer's identity provides context and helps businesses to understand their customers' preferences, behavior, and needs. This information can tailor the customer's journey, providing relevant content, offers, and recommendations.

A robust identity management system helps businesses keep track of their customer's interactions with their brand, allowing them to build a complete picture of the customer's journey. This information can be used to improve the customer's experience by providing them with a more relevant and seamless journey.

Moreover, identity also plays a critical role in securing the customer's personal and financial information. By verifying the customer's identity, businesses can reduce the risk of fraud and protect customer privacy.

How to Make an Effective Use of the Registration Process!

Registration is a critical step in the customer journey. It's where customers decide whether or not to engage further with a business.

To ensure your registration process is as frictionless as possible, you must leverage existing social platforms for login and registration. By doing so, you significantly reduce the amount of form-filling required. This streamlines the interaction and gets potential customers into your system faster.

At the same time, you can pull relevant information about those potential customers from their social platforms as they register, even if they are new to your system, to allow for even greater personalization of the marketing content sent to them after registration.

Here’s where the crucial role of a CIAM with social login feature comes into play!

CIAM: A New Standard For Passwordless Authentication

Once the transaction has been completed and the customer is no longer a “potential” buyer, we move on to the login experience. At this point, CIAM plays a pivotal role in balancing security with user experience.

CIAM for customers can provide a passwordless experience and an adaptive access control function that uses device characteristics or user behavior to verify identity and ensure a secure transaction.

Passwordless authentication provides a streamlined login experience using the customer’s device (something you have) and a biometric, typically via facial recognition or a smartphone’s fingerprint reader (something you are).

The customer does not need to remember overly complex passwords or tap into a clunky password manager for help.

Profiling Is The Future: How Progressive Profiling Will Change Marketing?

As we know that the customer journey is a process that begins with a trigger. A trigger prompts a person to research a product, service, or brand. Triggers can be many things:

• Seeing an advertisement.
• Hearing about something new in the news.
• Even feeling like it’s time to purchase something new.

You must make an excellent first impression. Once triggered, potential customers will typically visit a business’s website. This is where they first encounter your brand and decide whether they want to continue their research. This will set the tone for future interactions.

After landing on your website, customers may choose to provide an email address in exchange. By entering their information into this dialog box, they permit you to communicate with them in the future. This is what exactly is progressive profiling!

Over time, you collect additional information from them in a way that attempts to be unobtrusive, allowing you to market specifically to this potential customer as you move towards a more significant connection.

Consent Management: A Foundation for a Good Digital Experience

In an age where people are so bombarded with information, it's no surprise that some businesses have difficulty turning their customers into loyal advocates. But it can be done!

The key is building trust, which starts with ensuring the customer has control over their experience.

When businesses provide self-service tools, they give customers the ability to manage their information and decide what data they want to share with the industry and how they want to authenticate themselves when interacting with the company. This approach creates a better customer experience and deepens the relationship between the customer and the brand.

The key to maintaining customer loyalty and protecting your business is clearly understanding how you obtain, track, and use customer data. This can be achieved through consent management, where customers can actively grant or revoke consent to a particular usage of data by your business or choose whether or not they want any information about themselves deleted from your database.

It's all about building trust; once you do that, everything else will fall into place!

Delivering An Omnichannel Experience To Your Customers

We live in a world where everything's connected. As consumers, we expect our experiences to be seamless from device to device and channel to channel, regardless of the device or channel we use. We need businesses to provide consistent experiences so that we can trust them.

Providing an omnichannel experience has become a critical goal because you're expected to deliver the same customer experience from every device and channel your business supports. If you can do this, creating a single 360-degree view of each customer transacting via a mobile application is no different than accessing the company website on a laptop. There is a consistency of service that builds trust in your brand!

Conclusion

Customer experience is vital to many aspects of your business and the success of your overall organization. It's also essential to understand the importance of the customer journey and the role technology plays in this journey in the form of a robust customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution.

Customer experience and customer journey have been codified in our industry, but changes are still happening in this brave new world under which many struggles to adapt. To build personalized and engaging customer journeys, you must consider using a cutting-edge CIAM solution.