Building customer trust and meeting expectations for data privacy requires a thoughtful approach.

In an era where third-party cookies are increasingly blocked by browsers, the significance of first-party data cannot be overstated. Businesses must prioritize privacy-friendly methods to gather data and create profiles of potential customers. By embracing consent-based data collection, your organization not only harnesses the intrinsic value of data but also demonstrates a genuine commitment to protecting your customers’ privacy. This approach serves as a foundation for building trust with your customers, an essential aspect of fostering strong and enduring relationships.

Implementing effective user journey orchestration and a robust Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) solution can strike a balance between security, privacy, and convenience. This fosters a trustworthy digital experience throughout the customer lifecycle.

A five-step guide to orchestrating your customers’ journey with CIAM.

CIAM simplifies and secures logins, ensuring hassle-free access for customers across multiple digital channels. By enabling seamless and secure interactions, CIAM helps retain more customers throughout their journey.

• Streamline registration and login by capturing and managing customer identities.

While businesses often prioritize acquiring new customers, neglecting the experience once they’re onboarded can hinder loyalty and return on investment. CIAM addresses this challenge by providing a seamless and convenient experience at the digital front door. With CIAM, customers are no longer subjected to rigid authentication processes every time they visit your site. Instead, you can gather the necessary information at the right moment in their journey, allowing them to focus on their tasks without unnecessary form-filling. Moreover, CIAM enables intelligent decision-making regarding authentication requirements for existing customers based on risk environment and behavioural context. By adjusting the friction level, CIAM ensures a seamless authentication experience for customers.

• Utilize consent-based first-party data to build robust customer profiles.

CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) enables your brand to capture and securely store the personal data voluntarily provided by your customers. This valuable first-party data, obtained through consumer consent, empowers your business to create comprehensive customer profiles by aggregating and integrating data from various channels. By leveraging this data, your company can deliver a cohesive and personalized customer experience across different divisions.

• Integrate customer profiles with other engagement solutions in real time to deliver personalised engagement.

By creating comprehensive user profiles and gaining a deeper understanding of your customers, you can leverage these profiles to customize experiences across all digital touchpoints. This tailored approach allows you to deliver relevant content, personalized recommendations, and targeted offers, fostering a strong connection with your customers. As a result, they are more likely to return to your brand for further interactions, establishing a loyal and enduring relationship.

• Enhance security and reduce the burden with adaptive authentication.

A customer identity platform allows you to request only the necessary authentication information and ensures that it is prompted when needed. This approach presents two complementary aspects. Firstly, it grants you the ability to streamline the authentication process and eliminate unnecessary friction, enhancing the customer experience. Secondly, it demonstrates to customers that any friction introduced is proportionate to the specific situation, instilling confidence and making it easier to earn their trust.

By implementing MFA and utilizing a CIAM solution, you strike a balance between security and user experience, offering your customers a secure authentication process without burdening them with unnecessary hurdles. This approach ultimately contributes to building trust and loyalty among your customer bases.

• Profiling should be progressive.

When customers first engage with your application, their initial interaction often involves the registration process. It is crucial to ensure that this process is efficient and secure to prevent losing their attention and interest. One effective approach is to prioritize collecting only the essential information required from users. Adopting a “just in time” and “just enough” strategy for data collection can lead to a frictionless and secure prospect-to-customer journey, ultimately improving conversion rates.

By adopting a selective approach to data collection and leveraging a CIAM solution, you create a seamless onboarding experience for customers.

The CIAM solution also acts as a centralized storage for customer personal information, serving as the authoritative source of truth. This ensures that the data is consistently secured and readily accessible when needed.

An effective user journey orchestration has the following main advantages.

In summary, the deployment of a cloud identity platform, along with user journey orchestration, yields notable benefits for businesses. It not only facilitates customer acquisition by employing CIAM and progressive profiling but also fosters trust by ensuring robust security measures. This, in turn, boosts repeat business, minimizes account abandonment, and discourages customer churn, resulting in enduring and mutually beneficial relationships with customers.

Providing seamless deployment, centralized management, and robust security at scale, Okta Customer Identity offers seamless customer experiences. Designed with developers in mind, Okta Customer Identity minimizes the need for extensive custom code while providing a high level of protection. Whether you are building a new application, integrating multiple apps, enhancing account security, modernizing your systems, or establishing a platform, Okta Customer Identity empowers you to implement modern identity solutions flexibly and efficiently.