How Okta’s Customers Are Changing the Customer Identity Game

Diya Jolly, June 24, 2019

Regardless of their industry or size, every organization is becoming a technology company—and consumer demand for convenience and ease of use is the leading cause. Organizations need to enable their customers to access their tools, products, and services while providing them with intuitive digital experiences.

We know you’re responsible for providing this experience and exceptional security for your customers. Our customers are amongst the first to embrace an identity-centric approach to—buzzword alert—digital transformation, deploying customer identity to manage many of the complex challenges in the modern technology landscape. And we’re pleased to share some of their wins: after all, it’s our customers’ stories that keep us focused on developing the right technology to enable better service and security.

Building trust into the customer experience

We’ve all heard about big-name data breaches that have impacted users across social media platforms, hotel chains, credit agencies, and more. So, when grocery giant Albertsons was looking to modernize its service offerings by adding digital options for its customers, its team was very much aware of the risks associated with serving over 30 million customers a week.

By leveraging our customer identity solutions, the organization met its goal of seamlessly deploying new online offerings with a frictionless user experience that keeps customers safe and earns their trust. In the process, Albertsons strengthened its security practices and migrated millions of accounts onto its new platform without losing data or duplicating credentials. Having a birds-eye view of its accounts was a game changer: the grocer was able to oversee its identity environment and catch vulnerabilities with enough time to remedy them.

Containing sprawling user stores

Implementing a comprehensive customer identity solution has benefits beyond security: it’s also key to streamlining access to products and services—and improving internal processes for IT teams along the way. The Motorists Insurance Group serves as proof. The company has always focused on supporting a customer base of thousands of independent agents—but unifying 16 distinct insurance companies across multiple states was no small task. With disjointed IT infrastructure and various different agent portals, customer experience was suffering.

With the help of customer identity, Motorists was able to refine its processes, reduce the burden on its IT team, and give its 20,000 agents secure access to the applications they need. The company also implemented out-of-the-box integrations that connected its on-prem services to newer cloud-based platforms, helping to further modernize the enterprise.

We’ve seen this trend with customers across industries; Experian is another great example. In under a year, the company adopted customer identity, unifying all external applications, partners, and customers on a single identity platform—ultimately driving towards its goal of creating a frictionless customer experience.

Minimizing credentials

For users interacting with a wealth of applications on any given day, it can be difficult to maintain (and remember) multiple credentials. Your customers have password fatigue, and implementing streamlined login solutions can only benefit their experience.

To modernize how customers access their systems, MGM Resorts uses a combination of Single Sign-On (SSO) and Universal Directory to securely store all customer data, while providing instant access to its loyalty program and the various resort properties as soon as users log in. This customer-first mindset extends across channels: using our suite of developer tools, MGM continues to build mobile applications for an even better customer experience.

As the technology footprint of the enterprise evolves and expands, there will always be new obstacles. To overcome them, organizations need to do what they’ve been doing since the beginning: delight the customer.