Solution Brief: Creating a Secure, Seamless Customer Experience

Executive Summary

Digital transformation has become a modern business imperative. Today’s consumers are more technology savvy than ever, and expect rich, meaningful digital engagement with the products and services they consume.

But those experiences require trust, something that is not always easily gained. With data breaches and security incidents so prevalent in the media, customers are reluctant to share information, which impedes meaningful engagement.

Seizing control of identity offers a unique opportunity for brands to regain that trust. By crafting a forward thinking identity strategy, businesses are able to secure customer information, increase marketing effectiveness and deliver a superior customer experience.

Trust is Paramount to Customer Experiences

In an ever more competitive business climate, superior customer engagement through digital channels present a unique opportunity for differentiation. In fact, 76% of recently surveyed executives identify digital transformation as a critical or very important priority.1

While customers are eager to engage digitally, they increasingly exercise caution. And with good reason. Data breaches are everywhere, and it’s no secret that identity and access issues are usually the root cause.

A number of security issues arise from credential harvesting. First, contextual information gained can increase customer exposure to social engineering and malware attacks. It increases the risk of personally identifiable information being compromised.

Today’s digitally fluent consumers are more security aware than ever. They recognise these risks are inherent with the digital real. They lack confidence in an organisation’s ability to safeguard their information and are therefore reluctant to share it.

When confidence is low, it leads to a rash of issues that impede digital transformation initiatives. These issues include:

• Customers not sharing personal information. Consumers leave optional parts of blanks, and resist signing up for newsletters, loyalty programs and social media sharing unless they deem something highly important.

• Customers creating fake profiles. Taking this a step further, some consumers will even create fake identities to attempt to get at gated content without putting their information at risk.

• Customers reusing passwords. With so many different sites asking the same consumer for a login and password, many people resort to reusing a “disposable” password. If it’s compromised, nothing the customer deems overly valuable is at risk.

The Vicious Cycle of Mistrust, Faulty Data and Poor Experience

Ultimately, trust issues lead to real impacts to the business. They make it difficult to engage with customers, and make customers less willing to consume your product, services and trust your identity. Consequently, this makes it difficult to capitalise on revenue opportunities for your business.

Without accurate customer data and a clear picture of preferences, buying patterns and habits, marketing effectiveness and customers service initiatives are crippled.

Without trust, there is no data, and without data, there is no customer value. When businesses fail to deliver value, customers are even less likely to trust them, and many organisations get trapped in a vicious cycle.

Identity: The Foundation of Secure, Seamless Customer Experience

The good news is that while mistrust creates a vicious cycle, trust does the converse and creates a virtuous cycle. Consumers that trust brands engage more, which allows businesses to deliver more value, which in turn makes customers even more willing to engage.

The key to restoring that trust is to excel at understanding, managing and securing customer identity. A strong identity management strategy allows organisations to:

• Secure customer information. A modern, coordinated identity management strategy helps to drastically mitigate many of the credential harvesting vulnerabilities discussed earlier. Customers that feel secure are more likely to engage.

• Increase marketing effectiveness. As customers engage more with a brand, identity management helps create a rich, cross-service and product view of customer preferences. It helps marketing organisations deliver more strategic promotions and highly tailored offers that lead to better return on investment.

• Deliver seamless, branded experiences. A highly coordinated identity strategy helps businesses build customer experiences across brands and product/ service lines. Experiences can be highly integrated and personalised, which means better loyalty and satisfaction.

Why Okta?

Okta’s approach to identity and access management is uniquely positioned to help businesses take control of identity and access management across these three pillars of value.

Securing customer information

• Secure personally identifiable information in a modern, hardened cloud service with best-in-class security controls designed and built in

• Unify your customer identity infrastructure into a single service. This reduces silos, which create room for error and needless complexity—the enemy of security.

• Deliver secure sign-in with powerful options for single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. It is unrealistic for customers to remember tens or hundreds of strong passwords. Okta takes human error out of the picture.

• Manage complex authorisation across users, apps and APIs, allowing you to reduce the possibility of crosssite attacks and increasing the value delivered through unified experiences

Increasing marketing effectiveness

• Build a single, single view of your customers to understand what makes them tick. Learn about access patterns, preferences, usage trends and other metrics.

• Personalise promotions guided by a rich understanding of customers’ individual preferences. This leads to highly effective programs, with better conversion rates and higher return on investment.

• Integrate to the marketing and analytics solutions you already use, creating a far richer understanding of patterns and reducing the complexity of getting promotions and programs up and running

• Understand and empower your customers to take ownership of their experience, making frictionless and self-service models more profitable

• Drive engagement and loyalty, which leads to repeat business, referrals, cross-selling and upselling

Deliver a branded, scalable user experience

• Deliver customisable, branded customer experiences that create deeper engagement and foster customer satisfaction

• Use social authentication to enable sign-in from trusted sources such as Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. This not only makes life easier and more convenient for customers, but opens up opportunities to create social sharing experiences.

• Provide personalised experiences, delighting customers to learn that your business understands what they prefer

• Easily manage customer account provisioning and automate lifecycles with your business processes, giving you end-to-end control over the whole customer experience

• Build loyalty, and foster repeat business

Roadmap to Success

Seizing control of customer identity represents an opportunity to transform your business, leading to many benefits, including:

• Decreased cost and improved efficiency

• Accelerated business growth

• Enhanced security

While the change is transformative and may seem sweeping, the process to get there does not have to be overwhelming. You will know you are successful when you achieve these key milestones:

1. Unify customer identify infrastructure to eliminate silos and reduce complexity

2. Integrate marketing analytics solutions and enrich customer data

3. Personalise promotions tailored to your customers’ individual preferences

4. Build a detailed, single view of your customers

5. Secure personally identifiable information with powerful options for single sign-on and multi-factor authentication

We are Here to Help

Okta provides an end-to-end suite for modern identity management. We connect with complex service infrastructures, enrich context by providing threat intelligence to deploy single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and automate lifecycle management. We do all of that by working with your existing security infrastructure to provide value.

The Okta Identity Cloud Security Platform