3 Effective Ways to Ensure Your Identity Security Doesn’t Hamper Your CX

Customer experience is the holy grail when it comes to providing service to your clients. It allows you to establish reliability, trust and confidence among your clients, which can potentially increase your company’s revenue and reputation in your industry.

However, with a seamless customer experience, you must also have a robust security system to ensure that your consumer data is safe from unwanted cyber threats. To help you, here are several ways you can take advantage of to avoid compromising your customer experience.

The importance of balancing customer experience and identity security

As a business leader, serving and catering to your client's needs must be a priority as their experience could affect your business positively or negatively. A smooth and seamless customer experience (CX) dictates a consumer’s perception of your company, and whether they will do business with your brand again and recommend it to others..

According to a study conducted by PwC, around 32% of customers leave or abandon a company website, app, or platform whenever they encounter a subpar or negative customer experience. This has a ripple effect every business must avoid, with customers today able to leave reviews and ratings about their interactions with your company. Incurring any negative feedback about your brand can cripple your brand and hurt your revenue in the long run.

One of the most common inconveniences consumers face is a troublesome authentication process that delays them from accessing your brand. Too much security can push your new and existing customers away as account creation and login may become an exhaustive process for them. On the other hand, providing less can put your company and your consumer data at risk of outside threats and cyberattacks.

How to properly balance CX and identity security

Having a good balance of both aspects is crucial to ensure that your customers are happy when interacting with your brand. Here are a few ways you can use to provide a balanced experience to your customers.

1. Improve your account creation procedures

Companies worldwide have been collecting a large amount of consumer data through various methods. This allows them to store, manage and analyze data to help them with decision-making processes within their company. One way of collecting such information is providing an account creation feature that allows users to store information, such as name, email address and phone number, as a form of digital record for themselves when interacting with brands.

Having a smooth and seamless registration process allows your users to easily set up their accounts without going through numerous pages to secure a digital identity with your brand. There are many ways to establish a seamless registration process, such as:

• Passwordless authentication: This enables users to provide other forms of authentication, such as a proximity badge or hardware token linked to their devices.
• Biometric authentication. This allows users to simply provide basic details such as name and email without providing a password or confirming the passcode through email. Biometric sign-ons are usually linked with their devices’ sign-in properties (e.g., face ID, fingerprint).
• Single Sign-On (SSO). This is a login method that enables users to enter their login credentials once and be automatically logged in across multiple platforms connected with each other or the account.

These methods allow you to eliminate friction within the login and registration process. Using these processes also provides a high level of security among your users and their data. It eliminates the need to provide passwords across multiple platforms, which are more susceptible to risks and data compromise.

2. Be consistent with account maintenance

Account maintenance is another way to maintain strong security measures among your consumer’s accounts. This allows you to ensure that their accounts are actively monitored and regulated to reduce the chances of encountering unwanted data breaches.

The best Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions provide automation features that regularly provide automated actions such as password resets and account merges. Combining accounts in the case of consumers creating duplicate accounts allows you to manage consumer data more effectively. This also keeps your users from incurring multiple or overlapping charges due to unintentional duplicates.

Beyond regular password resets and preventing account duplicates, enabling your consumers to actively manage the data they provide in their accounts can also be beneficial in providing quality customer experience and security. This gives your consumers freedom on the type of information they provide where they can choose to give or hide sensitive details applicable to them.

3. Keep an eye on account lifecycle

It’s inevitable for some users to opt to abandon their account and interaction with your brand, leaving their digital footprints idle in your system. Not many users are active in actively deleting their accounts once they have decided to end their interaction with your brand. This leaves your consumer data and sensitive company information at risk.

Managing these types of accounts and ensuring that they are deactivated are crucial in increasing the security of your user’s information. Idle and inactive accounts are riskier to cyber threats than those in use.

Applying CIAM solutions to your identity and access management practices can help you search for inactive accounts in your database and effectively spot and clean your user database from dead accounts.

Achieve the perfect balance of customer experience and security

Finding the perfect balance between a seamless customer experience and high-quality user security is key to providing the best experience to your users when interacting with your brand. Incorporating CIAM solutions into your identity and access management procedures can help you secure both aspects with ease. CIAM provides various features, such as SSO, MFA), automated actions, and a centralized database.