Overcommitting engineering resources to building identity
The performance marketing solution, Wunderkind, helps brands scale and grow customer relationships. That ability to recognize you on a brand’s website and understand your online behavior — so you get messages that actually feel relevant and personal? That’s us.”Amandine Servain, VP of Marketing, shares.While identity plays a key role in powering Wunderkind’s experiences, the company is focused on identity resolution rather than identity management. While the team tried building its own login and authentication flows and working with a vendor, both required constant manual upkeep and troubleshooting.
This maintenance required a full-time engineer to monitor for issues, manually sync password changes to a separate database, and build custom integrations and one-off solutions to patch problems. Even with that attention, teams would occasionally find new gaps in the system’s functionality. If a user went to another country, for example, and couldn’t access SMS for Multi-Factor Authentication, the team had to simply disable MFA for that user and reduce the security of their login. “We aren’t identity experts,” says Ian Spence, principal software engineer. “Even if we had gotten it completely secure from my perspective, I needed to make sure we didn’t miss anything, and I’d rather have my team working on the stuff we are good at.”
Eliminating identity headaches without sacrificing security
Spence and his team’s experience with their existing platform provider reached a critical turning point when time spent on service and support calls was beginning to impact their ability to focus on other work. As they started evaluating other identity providers, Wunderkind knew they needed a solution that would work out of the box and close some of the gaps in their authentication flow that they might not even have considered.
As an existing Okta Workforce Identity customer, Spence and his team had some familiarity with Okta and Auth0, and when they evaluated the platform, “it was a no- brainer,” he says. “Auth0 had already productized so many of the headaches we were trying to solve. The login form is completely hosted by Auth0, so we were able to just hand that off, and we haven’t had to sacrifice anything.” With that, Wunderkind leapt to deploy Auth0 features such as Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)—including advanced features such as biometrics—and started to explore the platform’s extensibility options.
Implementing a more secure, more flexible identity solution
Almost immediately after adopting Auth0, Wunderkind was able to reallocate their engineering resources to new internal projects. Their full-time engineer dedicated to authorization, another 20+ hours per week of feature development, and several hours of weekly support calls to resolve authentication tickets are now all funneled back toward scaling Wunderkind. “We saw a 75% reduction in authentication-related tickets,” Spence says, “because everything just works.”
In addition to simplifying identity management, Auth0 has opened new opportunities for Wunderkind to customize and extend their identity solutions. They recently added email verification through Forms’ no-code editor to give their customers even more flexible login options. They can also now customize access permissions by user types, such as disabling MFA for select bot accounts without disabling it for everyone. Wunderkind is even using Auth0 to bring in new clients. The team has designed a Self-Service Single Sign-On flow using Auth0 and Shopify together, so new B2B customers can sign up on their own, giving their account teams more time to focus on more complex implementations.
These wins have pointed Wunderkind toward integrating Auth0 even further into their offering. By streamlining logins with Passkeys and federating identity management for clients, Wunderkind will be better positioned to meet their company mission and provide a more customized and secure user experience for everyone that uses the platform.
About Wunderkind
Wunderkind is a global performance marketing solution powered by AI, data, and identity that helps brands acquire and retain customers via owned channels at unprecedented scale. It helps teams create and grow customer relationships through websites, email, text, and ads.
