The increasing investments of companies in digital are beginning to pay off; in fact, more and more services are now available digitally, but the ways of registering and authenticating with usernames and passwords often make the user experience particularly complex and frustrating; being able to access and use digital services quickly and easily is the desire of all of us consumers, and when it happens we feel satisfied and sometimes even surprised.

One of the main challenges in designing the digital customer journey has always been to find the right trade-off between customer experience, privacy and security; today that trade-off is no longer necessary because some technologies have evolved significantly and can enable a boost to both the customer experience and the security of omnichannel digital services.

These are CIAM (Consumer Identity & Access Management) technologies used to manage customer identity and access to online resources. There are several reasons why companies might use these technologies:

1. Security: CIAM technologies can help protect sensitive customer data and prevent unauthorized access to online resources.
2. Personalization: CIAM technologies can collect information about customers to provide a personalized experience while interacting with the company.
3. Simplicity: CIAM technologies can make it easier for customers to access online resources, such as through the use of a single set of credentials to access different resources.
4. Data analysis: CIAM technologies can collect information about customers to provide marketers with a deeper understanding of their behaviors and preferences.
5. Customer relationship management: CIAM technologies can help companies manage customer relationships, such as offering personalized support and assistance.

The first imperative for CIAM technologies is to reduce friction in the service access process (i.e., what we all know as the login process) by providing a simple and equal access mode for all devices used, but ensuring secure two-factor authentication.

Thanks to the evolution of “more secure” authentication technologies (e.g., based on Biometrics), it is now possible to increase the level of security during the authentication steps while simultaneously simplifying the User Experience.

Particular attention is paid to a consumer’s first login, which is done through registration, a process that, as consumers, we would like to be as simple and secure as possible. CIAM’s solutions succeed in meeting this requirement by leveraging biometric technologies, now widely available on board all current devices (smartphones, tablets and PCs), and intelligent, real-time identity recognition through cross-analysis of documents and photo captured through the camera of the device being used, simplifying and making more secure both account reactivation/recovery and authentication processes, for all those digital services that deal with very sensitive and/or confidential aspects of the user, for which it is necessary to reconfirm his credentials or identity before authorizing the individual request.

In addition to simplifying and making more secure issues of access and authorization to digital services, CIAM solutions offer features that provide data on the identity and behaviors of customers. to create a detailed profile of each individual customer, which is essential in creating a personalized customer journey for different types of consumers.

CIAM solutions also enable the detection of risks in digital interactions with customers, identifying and preventing any anomalous behaviors that are not in line with the user’s identity through the execution of dynamic rules that continuously assess risks and allow defining what actions to implement when anomalous behavior is detected.

As the digital economy becomes more complex and the digital footprint of companies expands, the need for an optimal customer experience, within a customer journey that must also be secure, will only grow.

At B4 together with our partner Transmit Security we have envisioned a world in which companies no longer have to compromise between security needs and ease of access and use of services for their customers, and through our CIAM solutions we are able to help companies achieve this challenging goal quickly and without impacting existing IT infrastructure and applications.