Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)

What is customer identity and access management (CIAM)?

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is part of a company’s identity management strategy for external-facing users such as customers or community members. CIAM enables B2C businesses to securely manage the identities and permissions of their external customers. These tools ensure that the right user has the right access at the right time, and the ability to set preferences. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) software commonly allows a company’s customers to self-register and manage their user accounts and preferences. The software assists customers with setting up their user logins, authenticates their identity when signing in, and manages their preferences and other personalization information in a secure manner.

Benefits of using customer identity and access management (CIAM) 

One of the first experiences customers often have with a brand is logging into their customer user account. Ensuring these experiences are simple, streamlined, and secure is critical to creating delightful customer experiences. Using customer identity and access management allows businesses to properly manage customer experiences. The benefits of using CIAM include:

• Proper authentication: Using various authentication methods, from one-time passwords sent via SMS or email to evaluating contextual factors like the user’s IP address using risk-based authentication, a company can adequately authenticate their customers before granting access to permissioned user accounts. Depending on the types of actions a customer takes within the system, different levels of authentication may be required. For example, checking information like a billing statement can require only the initial level of authentication, but making a transaction or purchase, will require additional step-up authentication.
• Streamlined customer experience: Meeting customers where they are at--whether logging in on the web, on mobile apps, or through other interactions--is a major part of creating delightful customer experiences. Companies can create these omnichannel experiences with a holistic view of the customer identity using CIAM software. CIAM solutions unify and federate identity information to backend solutions to provide a streamlined, customer-centric identity experience across multiple corporate systems. CIAM software enables customers to interact with a user-friendly front-end interface, no matter how complex the systems are on the back end. 
• Personalized marketing: CIAM solutions allow users to indicate preferences and enable companies to build user profiles tailored to individual customers. CIAM solutions also centralize previously siloed customer identity data to generate a 360-degree view of users and their preferences. 
• Privacy and preference management: Similar to marketing preferences and personalization, end users can interact with CIAM software to share their privacy preferences. This may include revoking consent for specific data processing or marketing programs. CIAM solutions allow users to use self-service functions in this way. 
• Scalability: CIAM solutions can support customer user accounts at scale, especially during periods of high usage and growth.

Impacts of using customer identity and access management (CIAM)

The impacts of customer identity and access management policies on the company and end users are mentioned below:

• Security: At its core, CIAM ensures that users are granted the right level of access to their accounts, proving that they are who they say they are before accessing customer account information. Having strong user security is foundational to building strong customer trust in a brand.
• Scale: CIAM solutions are optimized to manage identities in the tens of millions, as opposed to thousands of user identities for enterprise-level identity and access management (IAM) software. 
• Compliance: For B2C companies, it is essential to capture and honor a user’s privacy preferences and requests in accordance with data protection and data privacy regulations. Using CIAM software, companies can centralize end users’ requests for data privacy actions enabling companies to meet regulatory compliance requirements. 

Basic elements of customer identity and access management (CIAM)

Customer identity and access management generally includes the following elements:

• Self registration: Enables a simple, streamlined customer onboarding experience with self-registration and self-service functionality, including account creation and preference management.
• Authentication: Verifies the user's identity with various authentication methods, including one-time passcodes sent via SMS, email, or voice, mobile push, contextual risk-based authentication, and more.
• Access and permissions: Enforces customer access to corporate services based on the customer’s user permissions.
• Centralized identity data: CIAM solutions unify siloed customer identity information across corporate systems to provide a streamlined, customer-centric identity experience. 

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) vs. identity and access management (IAM)

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is used for external-facing users such as customers and community members. This is different from identity and access management (IAM), which is optimized for a company’s internal users, such as employees or contractors. Another differentiating factor is scale; CIAM solutions are built to manage identities in the tens of millions, while enterprise-level IAM solutions can just handle thousands.