How to Build the Business Case for Customer Identity

If you value customer experience, privacy, and security, you probably don’t need convincing that customer identity should be a priority for your organization. You already know that a well-integrated customer identity and access management (CIAM) strategy is key to shaping digital experiences that keep your business secure and your customers satisfied. 

The thing is, building digital experiences that are both smooth and secure takes multiple teams working together across the entire organization. And getting all of these people on board and collaborating efficiently? That’s often easier said than done. 

When it comes to customer identity initiatives, there are generally two groups of teams that will have to work together, despite having different objectives: 

• Engagement-focused teams: You’ll find these teams in digital experience, product management, marketing, and other business units. Their overarching goal is to build digital experiences that drive engagement and revenue.     

   

• Security and privacy-focused teams: Found in areas like IT, security, identity, compliance and fraud, these teams make it their mission to protect customer security and privacy. 

Each of these groups will have a different perspective on customer identity and how it impacts customer experience, security, and privacy. They’ll also have different needs, and you’ll need to take those needs into account when choosing a CIAM solution that meets cross-functional requirements.  

You’ll want to involve as many stakeholders from across the business as you can. Broader buy-in will be critical to your success and key to maintaining project focus and momentum. Plus, as you bring more people on board, they can help you evangelize the benefits of CIAM when you demonstrate its value.

So how do you convince each group to get on board with CIAM? It’s all about customizing how you make your business case for customer identity. This will help you bridge the gap between these groups’ objectives, allowing you to align on a customer identity solution that delivers digital experiences that are both smooth and secure. Read on for our top tips on how to do it.

The goal of engagement-focused teams is to streamline how customers interact with a brand in order to drive revenue, increase acquisition, reduce abandonment rates, and boost customer lifetime value. To meet those business goals, these teams will look for any opportunity to remove friction from the user experience. While they do want to keep every experience secure, they don’t want those security or privacy controls to inconvenience customers or get in the way of revenue or product release timelines. 

Conversations with these teams are generally centered around how customer identity is the foundation of seamless digital interactions, from creating an account to contacting support. It’s also a good strategy to explain how the right identity solutions can make security almost invisible to the end user, which helps to reduce friction and avoid the risk of customers abandoning their journeys. 

What These Teams Care About: How customer identity impacts top-line revenue, customer acquisition and retention.

How to Communicate Customer Identity’s Value:

• Build support by demonstrating the business value customer identity creates, measured in revenue, customer acquisition, and similar metrics.

• Share data on current abandonment rates for login and registration forms and explain how identity management can improve them.

• Provide specific examples of how customer identity can improve the user experience by removing friction at every step of the customer journey.

• Focus on the speed and efficiency of integrating customer identity services into their apps.

For the teams charged with securing digital interactions and ensuring compliance, customer identity is key to preventing data breaches, detecting and mitigating fraud, and protecting customer data. These teams are focused on giving the business greater confidence in the identity of users they are engaging with. At the same time, they know that user experience is important, so they want to find solutions that don’t frustrate customers with repeated requests for authentication unless it’s absolutely necessary. 

These teams are also under constant pressure to keep pace with a fast-changing technology, security, and regulatory landscape, all while keeping total cost of ownership low. So when you’re talking to them, you’ll want to focus your conversations on how customer identity can help increase their agility to rapidly meet customer security requirements and privacy regulations, without increasing costs or delaying time-to-market. 

What These Teams Care About: How customer identity helps secure resources, maintain compliance and minimize risk.

A thoughtfully chosen and well-implemented customer identity solution can make a huge impact on your organization’s top and bottom line. By building a business case tailored to each team’s objectives and needs, you can elevate the value customer identity brings to your organization while helping the business prepare to choose the right solution. 

Want to learn more about customer identity and its impact on your business? Download Ping’s Ultimate Guide to Customer Identity and Access Management now.