Let’s admit it: we’re all in it for the money. As a business, you want to attract new customers and keep them with you as long as possible. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to sign up with you. And you want to give them a great customer experience, so they are not tempted to leave you. Identity management helps you achieve these goals.
Effortless onboarding
Digital onboarding, that’s where your relationship with a customer starts. It’s also the first point where that relationship can turn sour. Organizations sometimes make onboarding too cumbersome in a quest to get as much information about a new customer. The trick is to ask for just enough information to get things going, for instance, their email address. After verifying the email address, you can do two things: ask the customer to invent a password or allow them to log in using passwordless two-factor authentication (2FA). The latter offers, of course, the best customer experience.
By asking for only minimal information about the user, you lower the threshold to entry. And by applying 2FA, you increase security. That is killing two birds with one stone.
Build up customer knowledge
You can gradually build more fine-grained security by gathering more information about the user: what devices they use, what locations they log in from… And, of course, you can simply ask them for extra information now that you are building your relationship with them. Every time the customer comes back, you ask them for a little bit of extra info. You can add this data as attributes in the user profile. This allows you to build up knowledge about your customer.
Here too, the benefits are double. Firstly, you can use this behavioral data on the user to detect fraud. Secondly, you can use the information to provide the customer with a more personalized experience.
Gather smart insights
As you go along, you can gather more insights on user behavior, for instance, their preferred method of authenticating as they make return visits to your business. By offering multiple identification and authentication methods, you not only offer the customer choice but also get to know customer preferences. And you can actually see what the fastest method of onboarding customers is. And you will learn what identification method will cause more customers to abandon the onboarding. With this knowledge, you can refine your onboarding process, and make the process user-friendlier for your next prospects.
Identity management is not about getting as much information as possible, as fast as possible. As with so many things, identity management works best when taking a long-term view. Let users come on board as easily as possible, gradually ask them for more information, and learn how, from user behavior, to fine-tune your onboarding approach.
