Customer experience plays a significant role in acquisition and retention.
Although identity and access management solutions ensure user account security, they might put hurdles in customer experience. Having too difficult or user-unfriendly security measures like multiple authentication methods might add friction to what should be a seamless customer user experience.
For a large enterprise, you need a solution that balances security and customer experience and scales as the organization grows.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) software helps you deliver a seamless customer experience across different digital platforms while ensuring security.
Customer identity and access management provides an integrated solution to manage identities and regulate access to applications and services customers use to interact with a brand. It enables organizations to offer a delightful customer experience across multiple applications combined with improved security.
CIAM software provides users a smooth login experience, allows companies to keep their branding consistent across all customer-facing applications, and presents a scalable solution to accommodate several customers.
Customer identity and access management guides users through a hassle-free registration process, self-service account management, and consent and preference management, helping them navigate various applications easily.
CIAM tools come with security features like single sign-on and multi-factor authentication that help companies develop a better sense of security. Other features such as data access governance and access management come in handy while maintaining data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity.
Based on requirements, they can get CIAM software solutions on-premise, on a private cloud, or on an identity as a service (IaaS) platform.
CIAM is a secure solution to safeguarding customer identities. Without CIAM, your customer could face potential identity theft risks if they authenticate with the same passwords for different services and applications.
Customer identity and access management solutions use the multi-factor authentication feature to verify customer identity not only once but multiple times using biometric verification, one-time passwords, or push notifications. The software solution has a secure login page to prove customer identity, enabling customers to navigate services and applications seamlessly.
Moreover, CIAM’s single sign-on feature minimizes blockages in user experience while ensuring security through smooth access to all relevant channels. Overall, CIAM helps customers protect their identity and accounts from malicious hackers trying to steal user credentials.
When organizations gravitate toward security, they adopt identity and access management (IAM) software solutions for their workforce. CIAM provides a parallel security structure like IAM but excels at customer experience.
Facilitating a positive experience is paramount while onboarding and retaining more customers. CIAM solutions help customers navigate enterprise applications with ease. They also let brands deliver an experience that meets their client’s expectations.
Identity and access management solutions enable companies to manage user identities and securely authenticate their company employees, contractors, and other users in their workforce. CIAM solution, on the other hand, is meant to manage identity and authentication for customer experiences and is optimized to handle millions of customer requests and perform at peak times.
For example, with a stream of customer requests during an e-commerce sale, CIAM solutions are great at processing the resulting surge in traffic. They provide a highly accessible service regardless of a customer’s location or device.
Businesses implement CIAM solutions to ensure that customers face minimal hurdles while navigating applications. This software facilitates social authentication or passwordless authentication to provide frictionless customer journeys. The best IAM tools have strict security controls focused on meeting compliance standards and performing additional checks to verify users' digital identities.
Modern customers value experience. Brands that provide a seamless experience likely earn customers' loyalty. Consumers expect a secure, omnichannel, and personalized brand engagement.
CIAM helps consumer brands address these customer needs. It guides customers through online services as well as partner applications, the internet of things (IoT), and various other channels. CIAM also provides unified and secure access across multiple digital channels. Moreover, it collects customer identity data vital in strategizing and designing user experiences.
Below are some core capabilities of CIAM that make it a must-have for customer-centric organizations.
CIAM is an end-to-end security solution for customer identities and authentication. You can set up multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify customer identities multiple times using one-time passwords (OTPs), push notifications, geolocation, biometrics, or user behavior.
CIAM takes identity and access management one step further by facilitating secure access so that customers don’t see it as a barrier. You also get a granular overview of customer access requests to quickly detect anomalies in user behavior.
CIAM solutions allow customers full control of their profile data, from viewing where it’s shared to managing their preferences and consent. Data privacy is a crucial aspect of customer identity management systems. CIAM systems offer self-service preference and consent management, where customers can control and manage how companies collect and use their data.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) stipulates that customers establish consent and regulate it as needed. Reputed CIAM vendors adhere to the GDPR and similar data privacy laws, enabling customers to govern how their data is used. With CIAM, customers can set preferences for how companies use their data and for what purposes.
If businesses holistically observe customer interactions, they can better optimize user experience. This facilitates customer engagement strategies based on how your customers interact with your brand.
You may collect customer data and still be on the sidelines of properly leveraging it as the information is siloed within multiple departments. Remember, despite the various aspects that make up a customer experience, it’s unified, not divided. From your products to customer service, customers see it as an experience with your brand. And you can’t jeopardize it with security loopholes.
CIAM solutions help you get a unified view of your customers and visualize several identities and behaviors. They allow you to view customer identities, purchase history, trends, and other brand interactions, helping you personalize the user experience. CIAM platforms often integrate internal analytics solutions and optimize sales forecasting and new product development.
Customer experience is most affected when users log in or register, especially on multiple devices. Your customers shouldn’t have any friction points when registering or logging into different channels.
Social logins help mitigate such user experience issues and reduce customer fatigue but can also impact security. The MFA features of CIAM solutions allow you to provide more secure access and engage customers across different platforms with minimal authentication flaws.
CIAM helps organizations deliver a quality customer experience while minimizing security gaps in identity and access management. It’s an effective solution for hassle-free and secure logins that helps businesses retain more customers with seamless access across various digital channels.
Below are some notable benefits of CIAM.
Businesses spend a lot to acquire new customers, but they often forget to focus on customer experience. Providing a memorable experience is as important as attracting a new customer base. So what do you do to make sure you’re optimizing costs and delivering constant value to your customers?
Customer identity and access management fits right into this picture. It helps you simplify the registration process and ensures that the sign-up is consistent for all applications and resonates with your brand’s look and feel. This streamlines your registration process, minimizes drop-offs, and maximizes conversion rates.
After registration comes authentication. Customers might face frequent challenges accessing different services and channels at this stage. CIAM software streamlines authentication across multiple channels and services with its single sign-on (SSO) feature.
CIAM leads customers through a smooth, hassle-free process using social SSO or customer-friendly multi-factor authentication.
CIAM software allows businesses to store and view multi-channel customer data from a single platform. Every customer interaction has a specific purpose with a department that caters to this purpose.
These departments capture various types of customer data from multiple channels. When viewed together, this data helps companies optimize customer experience every time a customer interacts with a brand. It helps people navigate the brand’s various channels without repeatedly verifying their credentials.
CIAM solutions have self-service features that empower customers to reset their passwords and go through authentication protocols without involving the company's IT department.
It eliminates any back and forth with IT teams, enabling businesses to further improve customer experience and retain more customers on their platform.
IAM and customer IAM share the fundamental purpose of managing identities and providing access to the right people at the right time and for the right reason.
Below are some unique challenges associated with customer IAM:
CIAM software enables companies to manage multiple customer identities and preferences at scale. Customers can easily log into and navigate applications and other digital channels. CIAM offers self-service solutions where customers can control their preferences and give consent.
To qualify for inclusion in the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) software list, a product must:
*Below are the leading customer identity and access management software from G2’s Winter 2022 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure app user authentication for developers to build identity controls into applications, web services, and devices.
“Okta provides us with a one-stop Sign in for all of our business needs. Previously needing to remember 30, 40, even 50 different passwords were unnecessary and slowed down our team. Still, now a single sign-on solution like Okta has provided us with the security and the swiftness we need to get in and start working quickly.”
- Okta Review, Joshua S.
“SCIM configuration is quite confusing compared to the SAML configuration with Okta. It would be beneficial if things become easy to configure with a few clicks and feed correct information.”
- Okta Review, Suryaprakash K.
Auth0 is a flexible drop-in solution for your applications' authentication and authorization services. It’s a highly customizable identity and access management solution, enabling organizations to provide secure access to any application.
“Overall, it's effortless to use, it gives you templates in different programming languages that you can use on your apps, and it's very clear about what type of application you need to set up in Auth0 in order to meet your app's needs.
The sign-up/sign-in features are good. It’s easy for users to create an account and then login into the application. Also, you can set up regional settings, so users from different parts of the world can get the login page customized in their language. I'd recommend setting up a development tenant and a production tenant so you can have more freedom to test out new features in the development environment. You can allow access from localhost for developers. If you want to set up a production tenant, Auth0 runs a series of checks, especially for allowed URLs, so you know if your environment is ready for production.”
- Auth0 Review, Gustavo R.
“The documentation can be a bit circular sometimes. Read A for more. Then you read A, leading you back to where you started. It happened enough to be a bit frustrating.”
- Auth0 Review, Domanic S.
OneLogin provides a simple identity and access management solution for enterprise on-premise and cloud applications. It helps organizations ensure secure, one-click access for employees, customers, and partners across all device types.
“OneLogin is a life-changing tool for many people. Before onboarding, I needed more than 10 mins logging in manually in the apps that I worked with, not to mention remembering millions of different passwords. When initially setting up OneLogin, I added all of my websites, tools, and apps and logged in once. Now, whenever I need to log in somewhere, OneLogin does it automatically for me. On the other side, when logging in to your OneLogin profile, it has an option to add a 2-factor authentication method which you can choose from either SMS or their mobile app that works like a charm.
Been using Onelogin for more than a year now, I won't be switching to anything similar to this tool. If you are not a user already, I highly recommend it. Also, it supports many different languages to set your profile on. It’s even easier to use with the google chrome extension. For a big company like us with almost 2000 employees, it was a pivotal tool to get on board with.”
- OneLogin review, John V.
“The many tiers of training provided, you have to do the first training to gain access to the others, a bit of a waste of money when your team is already trained.”
- OneLogin review, Timothee L.
Microsoft Azure Active Directory offers single sign-on and multi-factor authentication features for enterprises. It provides conditional access in a single identity platform to engage with internal and external users and allows businesses to integrate with all applications and services using developer tools.
“I could list several positive aspects of Microsoft Azure Active Directory. First, I could mention conditional access for protection and access to corporate information. This is especially necessary for sensitive information or data, and it also ensures that approved personnel have proper access to the required resources, managing their identities efficiently, and it allows the integration of thousands of applications with a single sign-on managed by Azure Active Directory.”
- Microsoft Azure Active Directory Review, James P.
“The setup and migration to Azure Active Directory was tricky and turned out to be a lot more involved than we planned for. I also dislike that we have a hybrid solution and, therefore, must still create the user in the on-premise active directory server before creating the user in the Azure Active directory. It's still a great product that I recommend. However, those are the parts that I dislike.”
- Microsoft Azure Active Directory Review, Jason M.
Ping Identity offers an adaptive and intelligent identity solution with features such as single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, directory, and more. It empowers enterprises to balance security and user experience. Moreover, it provides various cloud deployment options such as identity-as-a-service (IDaaS), containerized software, and more.
“Ping utilizes open standards that help increase its interoperability with other applications. This use of open standards and overall stability makes it an excellent platform to base user authentication upon. The provided upgrade utility makes upgrades easy to perform. The professional services group from Ping have also been excellent and have been a true partner during implementation and other additional projects.”
- Ping Identity Review, Anthony S.
“The UI/UX leaves a little to be desired. Navigating the process of configuring your application or accomplishing support tasks can be a little difficult. The documentation is decent, and support is always willing to help. Notifications and events would be nice to have (cert expiring, etc.). Moreover, a more "logical" view on Connections and Applications would be instrumental when dealing with multiple applications with different connections.”
- Ping Identity Review, Tyler A.
Customer identity and access management software helps you maintain a reasonable balance between security, privacy, and customer experience. It’s scalable when managing several customer identities and ensuring security and compliance.
Learn more about privileged access management to monitor and manage privileged accounts and prevent hackers from stealing identities.