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Digital experiences can be convenient, secure and privacy-protecting at the same time – with the right digital vision and identity orchestration in place, writes Ashley Diffey, Asia Pacific Lead at Ping Identity.
The service industry has known for some time that experience is everything. However, not every company has proven to be able to deliver the level of experience customers expect.
Four years ago, 75% of consumers ranked experience as “just behind price and quality” as the driving force behind purchasing decisions. PwC research found that customers were also more willing to pay a premium for good service.
A lot has changed over the years, making experience even more important in the eyes of customers. Digital has significantly raised the bar for the kinds of experiences that are possible, and this in turn has raised customer expectations.
The one thing that hasn’t changed is that there’s still a gap in expectations—between the type of experience customers want and the one they’ll receive. As McKinsey & Company recently noted, “The opportunity to take advantage of digital or omnichannel experiences remains wide open.”
When customers interact with a brand digitally, they expect the entire journey to be easy, personalized and frictionless. They also expect interactions to respect their privacy and be secure.
Those are pretty reasonable expectations, but historically there’s been some tension in trying to create experiences that are—all at once—convenient, secure, and privacy-protecting.
Businesses tend to do really well on one aspect while falling short on the other two. For example, their security might be top-notch, but the user experience really isn’t comfortable, and data privacy is an afterthought. This often leads to digital experiences that fail to satisfy either the customer or the business.
Where customers land
A 2016 McKinsey & Company study found that when it comes to experience, 30% of users will prioritize simplicity and convenience over security; 10% place the highest priority on security; and the remaining 60% “are willing to make reasonable compromises in both comfort and safety.”
The study illustrated the problem with two hypothetical shoppers who encountered the same retail website. One customer can’t remember their login details, goes through a reset, “and ends up feeling frustrated with what seems like a clunky process”; the other remembers his password, but he finds authentication too easy and draws conclusions about the security of the site.
“These two customers have very different expectations for their digital security: One values convenience, the other values security. How can you make them both happy?” the researchers said.
Keeping both—or even all three—potential cohorts of customers happy is possible. According to McKinsey, businesses go wrong by taking a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t take into account differences in customer experience expectations. The researchers recommended a more detailed approach to the problem.
Enter: identity orchestration
Six years have passed since the McKinsey study, and unsurprisingly, alternative options have also emerged in that time.
Today, one of the ways to optimize convenience, security and privacy when creating digital experiences is to use identity orchestration. It can help remove complexities and friction from the customer journey and create seamless digital experiences while meeting different balances of customer needs.
Identity orchestration provides a flexible approach to designing, testing and optimizing digital experiences that combine convenience, security and privacy without compromise.
Businesses can use it to integrate identity services such as fraud detection, identity verification and authentication into critical digital touchpoints at every stage of the customer journey.
Advantages
Using identity orchestration to design and deploy digital experiences has three key benefits.
First, the best identity orchestration platforms are either low-code or no-code; instead, they use an intuitive, graphical (“drag-and-drop”) approach to create seamless and secure end-to-end customer journeys. This saves weeks or months that would otherwise be spent developing custom integrations to connect multiple systems.
It also means teams can quickly iterate and test experiences without waiting for tech support, meaning they can stay focused on what’s important: delivering customer experiences that drive engagement and revenue.
Second, identity orchestration ensures consistent experiences across all channels. As your use of digital technologies grows, so do the number of digital touchpoints your business needs to design and maintain. Identity orchestration makes it easy to optimize the digital experience across different apps, devices and use cases, ensuring customers have consistent, personalized journeys with your brand no matter which channel they choose to use.
And third, it gives businesses more control over the customer experience. Identity orchestration enables businesses to use any customer identity or business service to create a seamless digital experience.
If you have a vision for the perfect digital experience, identity orchestration makes it much easier to make it a reality. By seamlessly integrating essential customer identity services with your business applications, you can design, test, and optimize digital experiences that delight your customers and deliver value to your business—eliminating friction, increasing security, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
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