4 Common Mistakes Businesses Make When Devising a CIAM Strategy

As digitization and online platforms become a standard for many, it’s essential for companies to craft a well-rounded digital strategy when it comes to their CIAM. To help you, we’ve listed the common mistakes businesses make when creating a CIAM strategy and how you can avoid them committing them.

What is CIAM?

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) refers to the practice of providing users and customers access to their digital properties while at the same time managing, collecting, analyzing and storing the data in a series of networks or cloud-based systems.

It combines features from customer registration, self-service account management, consent and preference management, Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), access management, directory services and data access governance.

The importance of CIAM for business

The world is actively shifting to digital and online platforms to provide convenience and accessibility for products and services. Incorporating CIAM into your business helps you provide users access to such data while ensuring the highest quality of security, efficiency and customer experience.

Moreover, gaining access to your customer data allows you to analyze and process them to help you create a more seamless and consumer-centric platform that can enhance your customer experience and boost overall revenue.

Common mistakes when creating a CIAM strategy

When used properly, integrating CIAM strategies in your business operations can place you at an advantage against your competitors. That said, it’s crucial that you find the best CIAM solutions that can fully cater to your business needs and be aware of those that may derail your CIAM strategies.

Here are the common mistakes enterprises make when implementing CIAM into their business and how you can avoid them to secure a successful CIAM strategy.

1. Confusing IAM with CIAM

It’s common for companies to confuse their approach towards IAM with CIAM. While similar, IAM and CIAM have a significant difference in functionality. Identity and Access Management (IAM) manages internal identities within a private network. On the other hand, CIAM focuses on providing access to external identities (e.g., customers, clients, partners, investors etc.) within a public network such as a marketplace, online database, etc.

Additionally, one distinct difference between the two platforms is how it maximizes user experience. For IAM, user experience is rarely maximized or considered as enterprises focus on the security and control of how users (employees) access their database while keeping intruders or external parties away from the network. For CIAM, user experience and safety are greatly considered as this dictates the quality and quantity of leads a company can produce over time.

When incorporating CIAM into your business, you must consider the following aspects the ensure that your customers can easily engage with you online:

• Customer experience
• Privacy and security
• Scalability
• Access to account and data management
• Compliance

Taking the time to focus and balance these aspects can help you create a more sound and comprehensive CIAM strategy that centers on customer experience and satisfaction.

2. Overusing authentication processes

Ensuring a safe and protected platform is key to achieving a high-quality customer experience. However, bombarding your users with numerous authentication and login processes can negatively affect their experience with your brand.

Around 32% of users abandon a company website or app when encountering a bad customer experience. Providing a more seamless and easy login process will enhance your customer’s experience, leading to better lead conversion. Some authentication methods you can use that give a fast and easy login process for your users include SSO, Face-ID or Virtual Key Logins and MFA.

Convenience, efficiency and seamlessness are vital to keeping your users interested and confident when interacting with your brand. Having a good balance of security and customer experience is key to any successful CIAM strategy.

3. Lack of security

In contrast to having too much security, providing a lack thereof can also damage your CIAM strategy and potentially lose your end-user’s interest. Given that everything is stored in a cloud-based system, users want to ensure that the data they’re providing you is stored securely from any cyberthreat such as viruses, data breaches and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.

To give your customers confidence to engage with your services, you must provide a clear and thorough privacy policy that details how you will manage, store and analyze their data. You can also use the following factors to improve your user data's safety further.

• Provide end-to-end encryption of user data
• Consistently update security software
• Verify private data

Letting your users know how you manage, store and analyze their data is essential in establishing trust between your brand and consumers. Providing them with effective and high-quality security practices can help enhance their customer experience and overall interaction with your products and services.

4. Failing to understand your consumer base

Many enterprises make the common mistake of applying CIAM strategies irrelevant to their consumer base. You must take the time to understand how your consumers behave to provide a tailor-fit experience to your clients.

Beyond providing efficiency and safety as key features to your CIAM platform, you must also ensure that the features you provide are relevant and applicable to your customers. Providing social logins and biometrics as a primary authentication method can be irrelevant if your consumer base is unfamiliar with these methods.

When devising your CIAM strategy, you must consider your market’s age, gender, income, location and occupation to help you understand who your consumers are and what they are looking for when interacting with your company.

Create an effective CIAM strategy for your business

Digital and online platforms are rapidly becoming a standard across numerous industries, enabling companies to reach and provide services to clients wherever and whenever they need them. Utilizing the best CIAM solutions and strategies allows you to ensure that your customers – and their data – are secure while providing the highest quality of customer experience.