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How to Meet Customer Needs and Grow Revenue with Customer Identity Management
Is Your Enterprise Ready for a Digital Transformation?
Enterprise CIOs and VPs of technology face growing demands to scale their digital platforms. Gartner estimates that 2020 is the sink-or-swim year for mid- and large-sized enterprises—organizations with more than $250 million in annual revenue—to modernize their digital infrastructure.
Scaling digital platforms can be a daunting task. It involves large-scale efforts to accommodate growing demands in online customer experience, data personalization, and a centralized identity infrastructure for your users. What’s more, these initiatives often rely on comprehensive upheavals to business and operating models.
By 2020, businesses will have to develop new digital experiences and unique online services just to stay competitive, let alone to get ahead. Top companies across media, telecommunications, and financial industries feel pressure to increase market share and deliver more value to their customers. Executives know they can’t fall too far behind.
Digital capabilities are lagging
Additional Gartner data highlights the challenges that come with this changing landscape. Over half of all enterprises surveyed have less than expert-level capabilities for implementing or updating critical digital platforms, such as managing data systems for analytics and modernizing technology ecosystems to better serve users.
Only about 34% of digital technologies are adequately optimized for enterprise businesses in all industries, but enterprise CEOs have identified, on average, a need to drive 11% of growth exclusively from “digital revenue.”
Even digital optimization isn’t enough
Tackling this gap requires more than digital optimization. A full business transformation to create new digital services and business models are crucial, especially for customer retention.
Imagine an online portal and an accompanying mobile app where customers have to log in at each new touchpoint, struggling to remember their passwords. Their customer journey is disjointed and impersonal. Many studies show that not only will customer engagement decrease but churn rates will gradually increase as well.
Customer Identity Management to Drive Revenue Growth
So how can you make sure that your organization stays ahead of the curve with a business digital transformation when faced with resource challenges and competitor pressure?
1. Go beyond optimization to enterprise-level digital transformation.
By 2022, just two years after Gartner’s sink-or-swim date, digital platform adoption will create new market leaders in roughly half of all industries.
Success in the face of such drastic, impending shifts hinges on the foresight of CIOs and tech VPs to build new revenue opportunities for their organizations. Simply enhancing previous technologies to improve productivity and customer experience will only safeguard bottom lines. A fully proactive solution also involves creating new revenue streams and transforming business model in the digital era.
2. Adopt low-risk third-party platforms.
With third-party platforms, you can optimize resource efficiency and set yourself up for highly customizable solutions that can be applicable for new business-development opportunities across your digital brand. A flexible, cloud-based solution can offer out-of-the-box third-party integrations to meet user demands and build unified customer profiles.
By investing in a cloud-based customer identity platform, for example, you can lay the foundation for a transformative digital business solution to simplify your operations while enabling scalability across markets and customer channels.
3. Identify what’s important to bring clarity to the task at hand.
Studies show that a digital identity strategy that enhances the registration experience, authenticates customers, and personalizes the user journey improves the bottom line, streamlines business processes, and ultimately delivers value.
Specifically, roughly 80% of customers express frustration when their identity and data are lost when switching between channels. Almost as many will not do business with companies whose digital platforms aren’t tailored uniquely for them. Those statistics have nearly doubled in a few short years thanks to popular brands like Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks, and Uber. These providers continually improve their technologies to augment the digital experience for their customers and raise the “expectations game” across the board.
Focusing on a digital identity strategy will secure and enhance your online services at a broad level. By disrupting your technology landscape to rethink how your organization responds to trends like digital identity convergence, big data and analytics, and “device identity,” you can setup your enterprise business for success in the future.
But what does this kind of digital identity strategy look like?
Identity convergence: responding to the new, diverse customer
In today’s globalized world, your customers are no longer merely customers when they access your digital services. Instead, they converge from multiple persona types:
- An online user of a direct revenue service
- An evangelizing content creator
- A consumer of community information and marketing collateral
In the past, standalone, online-based revenue streams and information databases could coexist with little need for overlap, let alone integration. However, in today’s burgeoning digital-business ecosystem, you need a management tool for customer identity that recognizes multiple personas and links them to the same online identity.
Leverage data and analytics to serve your users better
As more operational models among enterprise businesses encounter digital identities and the proliferating number of third-party platforms that host and support them, data and analytics needs become more complex. Companies must increasingly consider how they will:
- manage swaths of data
- connect it across their entire digital landscape
- leverage this information for customer success
A central, cloud-based solution to handle all of your customer identity needs can help consolidate the digital identities of your users, removing data silos throughout your whole digital ecosystem.
“Device identity”: growing when the internet is everywhere
With the emergence of the internet of things and myriad mobile devices on the market, taking advantage of identity-based opportunities around all of the devices and electronic items can make the difference in leading the pack among your competitors or constantly having to play catch-up.
- Users today might expect a simplified online registration when buying products across web browsers, phones, smartwatches, or their Amazon Echo or Google Home.
- Exercise junkies might expect their fitness devices to sign them in to their account at their local gym’s computer terminal or sync with their online account from home.
- Citizens might expect to be able to conveniently switch between their phone and their tablet when logging in to a city government’s online platform. They want to book an outdoor event and pay their property taxes, all with a single sign-on (SSO).
Whatever the device and the customer’s need, your organization has to prepare for these expectations as they relate to a plethora of digital devices, now and into the future, if growth and sustainability are part of your enterprise’s long-term roadmap.
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
Planning for Gartner’s 2020 threshold for digital transformation need not be a daunting task after all. A B2C CIAM solution for your company is an example of a cloud-based, holistic solution to store, manage, and secure all of your customer data and identities.
A customer identity solution provides several benefits ranging from personalized user journeys and seamless SSO capabilities, serving as a strong starting point for a digital transformation strategy.
Look for a strong, enterprise-grade solution that offers secure data storage, data encryption, and superior uptime capabilities to easily access and maintain customer information. You’ll be able to protect your customers’ identity and ensure that your services always function reliably so you can scale your organization and stay ahead of market trends.
With the right CIAM platform, for example, you can track your customer’s entire digital journey and integrate the data with marketing automation tools to cultivate your marketing and upselling campaigns directly within your own platforms. Plus, offering a coherent omnichannel experience via SSO means your customers can browse your digital service, shop online, interact with mobile-first content, and ask support questions on social media, all without having to re-authenticate themselves each time. Seizing on these benefits, you can eliminate data silos and create a single online identity for each one of your customers.
If you’re interested in learning how a cloud-based CIAM solution can help your enterprise transform your digital infrastructure, download 4 Key Entry Points to a Digital Transformation. This e-book features case studies for each specific entry point to help you understand how a best-of-breed identity platform could provide value to you.
