How a seamless login experience can capture, convert and keep customers
Secure identity provider Okta is working with CIOs and business leaders to help organisations offer a great customer experience by delivering secure and frictionless digital interactions
Delivering a flawless customer experience online is essential for organisations to build trust and confidence in their brand, leading to increased consumer satisfaction and future wins. Identity has become the foundation for building this success.
Most internet users have numerous accounts that they access daily. From work through to shopping and entertainment, every day we conduct all sorts of transactions across websites and mobile apps. Each and every one of these has a different experience – whether it’s registration, login or account recovery.
This lack of consistency causes confusion and frustration among customers.
At the centre of these experiences is identity. Organisations need to establish a strong, trusted identity to deliver the great and consistent customer experiences that are expected of them.
Secure identity provider Okta appreciates that the online world should be a place where you can learn more about your customers, understand how best to communicate new products and changes in services, and attract new customers.
Okta is an expert at delivering robust identity and access management (IAM), zero-trust security, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to enable a great total experience. This encompasses two things: the end-user customer experience when using the organisation’s apps; and the ability for the organisation to learn more about how their customers engage online over their lifetime.
Okta has helped more than 14,000 customers to deliver better, more secure online experiences to both customers and their workforce. The company is working with CIOs and business leaders to ensure organisations can offer the best customer experience based on a strong identity foundation, leading to a holistic view of the customer, while removing frustrations and barriers to digital interactions. A strong identity is based on secure access to accurate information to prevent damaging leaks and compromised data.
“If you think about the customer experience, every time you buy online, you have to log in. Experiences can vary dramatically based on the logins required to authenticate the user,” says Ian Lowe, head of solutions marketing for Okta in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Password problems
Lowe highlights how customers are fed up with password-based logins, which are often inherently insecure, citing Okta research showing that 86% of respondents admit to re-using passwords, while many will write them down because they are impossible to remember.
“Countless security breaches occur due to re-used passwords, as criminals can replay them on sites, creating risks to consumers and to organisations that supply goods to consumers,” says Lowe.
The customer login experience directly impacts revenue, according to a report by analyst Forrester, which warns that if a company’s online user management and security functions do not work, customers simply turn to competitors.
“Customer identity access management has a direct impact on the bottom line,” warns Forrester’s Customer-obsessed IAM operating model report.
Organisations should focus on improving customer experience and security together. This can often be achieved through biometrics, which is welcomed by customers with over 50% more likely to sign up if they can use biometrics, compared with just 30% wanting to register if the option is having to supply a username and password.
The sign-in experience is often the first interaction a consumer has with an organisation’s online brand and where they will first make a judgement on whether to trust the company with their critical data. They want a frictionless and secure user experience.
This can be delivered via a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution that allows organisations to capture, convert and retain customers, leading to business growth.
“There is often a disconnect between user expectation and experience. Ease of use trumps most things, but 92% of consumers expect companies to keep their data safe and it is easier to steal usernames and passwords than it is to steal fingerprints,” says Lowe.
A secure customer experience linked to identity defines a level of trust with the business. “The pitfalls on the business side are that usernames and passwords run the risk of breaches – not if, but when. Breaches reduce consumer trust in the brand,” says Lowe.
Building trust
By 2022, digital businesses with a smooth customer journey during identity corroboration will earn 10% more revenue than comparable businesses with unnecessary friction in the customer journey, according to analyst Gartner in its report, Create trust and safety on the internet.
Businesses that rely on usernames and passwords reduce consumer trust because they are relying on traditional methods, leading to poor customer experiences, greater risk of data breaches, and ultimately lost customers.
Many organisations that are still reliant on legacy identity methods risk getting it wrong at that vital customer onboarding stage.
“A sign-up experience requiring too much user information may lead to user drop-off, especially if the information is not relevant,” says Lowe.
Okta works with organisations to deliver its “Trust at Work” approach to help enable identity as the foundation for delivering great customer experiences. Okta delivers this process with its zero-trust framework, which gives organisations a holistic view of their identity and security strategy.
Gartner defines the zero-trust approach as “never trust, always verify”, and this is the foundation of Trust at Work. The aim is to secure every user, wherever they are, any time, irrespective of the device they are using. This ensures that customers are who they say they are and their buying history and interactions with the organisation are easily accessible and accurate.
A key focus is delivering an enjoyable experience for users, says Lowe, and each organisation must put the customer at the centre and ask, “What is the ideal experience I am looking to deliver?”
CIAM benefits
Organisations that secure identities and deliver a seamless experience for customers, providing a smooth onboarding or signing-up experience, can reap the benefits.
CIAM helps deliver more value to users in several ways:
- Trial experiences: Giving customers an opportunity to experience the value of your brand before they commit should not come with strings attached in the form of friction or too much required information.
- Loyalty programme changes or additions: Making sure customers are informed about new affinity opportunities can impact retention rates, as can properly implementing single sign-on (SSO) across multiple brands or properties during a merger or acquisition.
- Gain a 360-degree view of your customer: Support for new customer relationship management or customer analytics initiatives increases the ability to create a complete user profile. Those insights can help promote services more effectively and build more personalised experiences that engage customers.
- Reduce risk exposure due to compliance or data privacy inconsistencies: Standardising how sensitive data is handled can streamline compliance for key regulations and data privacy laws, ultimately reducing risk.
Lowe highlights organisations that have worked with Okta and focused on putting a great customer experience at the heart of identity and online interactions.
These include a company that saw a 90% fall in customer service helpdesk tickets after implementing MFA. An insurance company enjoyed a 30% increase in customer effort scores by implementing single sign-on which eliminated separate portals for home insurance claims versus car insurance claims, for example. Another project saw a city portal prevent eight million bots from making fraudulent login attempts.
Another major success was Okta’s partnership with the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) to reduce the complexity of services spread across multiple digital platforms and apps.
RBFA implemented a consolidated portal with single sign-on to 12 applications for a frictionless user experience. This led to an increase in revenues by giving insight into the intersection of data and identity, allowing personalised suggestions and more effective advertising and sponsorship. Implementing adaptive multi-factor authentication for security-sensitive apps enhanced security across the federation.
“The user experience improved for different people interacting with RBFA. Before, there were portals for different people engaging with RBFA. For example, one for e-commerce and fans buying memorabilia, a portal for players and referees, and another for more information about teams. There were lots of personas, and some players and referees were also customers, but they had separate identities and logins for each portal,” says Lowe.
By using MFA credentials across portals, RBFA, in partnership with Okta, increased customer satisfaction and delivered a seamless experience.
Better customer experience
Since the pandemic, and with a fragile global economic recovery, organisations are under increased pressure to deliver a great service as more people choose to work and shop online.
“Digital transformation projects accelerated during the pandemic. Organisations have to get it right. Every company today has to be a tech company in order to survive or be profitable,” says Lowe.
Organisations that get it right, like RBFA, gain a better view of their customers, are better able to personalise marketing more effectively as they have a centralised view of identity, and can ultimately build trust with the customer and enjoy a strong relationship.
“They deliver a better customer experience by improving registration, login and the support experience. When you improve customer experience, customer retention increases,” says Lowe.
Better customer experience leads to better reviews attracting new customers and creating a virtuous circle. Often, organisations only make the link between customer experience and technology when the technology fails.
A PwC survey found one in three consumers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
“Organisations don’t get it right all the time. Maybe the CIO wants to create a new mobile app and the IT team builds the app, but no one has communicated what the customer experience should look like. It is important not to just react to a request but to step back and look at what you are trying to achieve and why,” says Lowe.
He advises that IT teams should not focus only on solving the initial need but should look at how any new app will impact the company infrastructure and have conversations upfront with business leaders about customer experience.
“You need to think about how experiences should be connected,” says Lowe.
An identity foundation
Okta supports organisations by enabling these vital conversations around customer experience. “We show how business value can be achieved. We take the foundation view that starts with identity and experience and can help you wherever you are on your journey,” says Lowe.
Okta works with organisations to create an identity foundation, implement MFA, and provide better login experiences for customers. “The three critical areas to focus on to deliver great customer experience are sign-up and registration; login experience; and customer support,” says Lowe.
Organisations should not look at these as separate silos but appreciate that identity encompasses all three areas.
Trust and safety on the internet are critically important to providing a great customer experience and the foundation for delivering that is identity.
Customers have strong expectations around trust online that must be met for the business to thrive.
Lowe concludes: “To deliver a great customer experience, you must have a strong foundation in identity and security.”