Security vs. convenience: Striking the balance in customer identity access management

Over two decades ago, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, co-founders of consulting firm Strategic Horizons LLP, described consumer experience as the “next competitive battleground” for businesses.

Fast forward to today, and it’s clear that providing a superior customer experience is crucial – doing so could net a company up to 5.7x more revenue than its competitors.

That’s why businesses are constantly thinking about ways to improve their customer experience, from targeted marketing to omnichannel approaches and personalized customer engagement. In 2019, the total worldwide spending in the field hit US$508 billion, a 7.9% increase from the previous year.

Throughout all of these approaches and technologies, there exists a common thread: First impressions are key when it comes to the customer experience. And for businesses with an online presence, everything begins at the login page.

The first bump in the road

While making a login page might seem simple, there’s a lot that goes into building a seamless experience, says Richard Marr. He’s the Asia-Pacific general manager at Auth0, a solutions provider for customer identity access management.

One hurdle is that security measures have to be implemented during account creation to verify user identities. However, this could make account creation tedious, causing new users to drop off.

Richard Marr, Asia-Pacific general manager at Auth0 / Photo credit: Auth0

“Businesses often give you a very long form to fill out before you get a set of credentials and a password to log in,” he explains. In mobile apps, for example, 43% of potential customers are lost due to friction in the onboarding process.

Another pain point in the process: passwords. A good security practice is to create a unique password each time you make a new account. However, users often have difficulty remembering which password they set for a specific website or app and sometimes set the same one across several accounts, making them vulnerable to hackers.

Fighting the friction

To guarantee that the customer experience is smooth and secure, it is important that businesses follow a set of best practices when it comes to customer identity access management. However, companies in Southeast Asia often prefer to use solutions that have been developed in-house due to the lower costs involved.

This creates a vicious cycle: Using in-house solutions slows down the adoption of the latest technologies – such as cloud infrastructure – and causes these companies to lag behind their competitors. This, in turn, makes in-house solutions inferior or more difficult to build, Marr says.

“The perception is that I can just throw some developers at it and I’ll be able to build something,” he notes.

While potential solutions like facial recognition can help solve a lot of the problems in customer experience, these features can be complex to develop and maintain. And because they require a high level of technical expertise, they can take up important company resources and divert attention away from a company’s core business model and processes.

Photo credit: rawpixel / 123RF

“To build these [solutions] yourself, you need good developers. The problem is, good developers are a scarce resource, and you want to focus on innovation instead [of finding these developers],” Marr says. All in all, adopting these solutions without allocating resources properly could increase costs of project development by up to 30%.

For companies that want to avoid these pitfalls, one solution would be to engage the services of a firm that can handle customer identity access management on their behalf.

When going this route, it’s important that current operations are not affected, Marr notes. For example, companies should try to make the migration process smooth for their users by making sure they don’t need to reset their passwords or create new ones. For this, service providers like Auth0 can help by acting as an intermediary during the transition.

The firm allows clients to move their users to a custom database connection without the need for new passwords. Then, login authentications from users would be done through Auth0’s database, removing the need for a new, custom database that requires customers to reset their passwords.

Additionally, when migrating to a new service for customer identity access management, companies should use a phased approach. This means businesses can migrate users to the new service while keeping the old one accessible should any problems arise.

Finding the right balance

With digitalization in Asia advancing at a rapid pace, companies in the region will need to be cognizant of effective customer identity access management if they want to succeed.

According to Marr, keeping a good balance between security and customer experience will remain an ongoing issue. With cases of identity theft on the rise, this is set to be a perennial challenge for companies everywhere.

For businesses, engaging service providers that not only give them the capability to adjust this balance as and when it’s needed but also have the expertise to advise them on how to best keep this balance may be the deciding factor between success and failure.

“For businesses, depending on their industry, they’re going to have a different view of how that dial should be turned,” Marr says. “It’s about how you twist that dial and ramp up security only when you need to.”

Auth0 is a customer identity access management platform that provides solutions for businesses. Its identity solutions can be integrated directly into products, securing identities to allow for great experiences in both creating and using apps.

To find out more about how Auth0 can help your business, sign up on its website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.