3 Basic Mistakes in Digitalisation

02 May 3 Basic Mistakes in Digitalisation

Guest blog from Petteri Ihalainen VP Marketing & Mobile Services with b10v portfolio company Ubisecure.

Digitalisation is one of those words you hear constantly. Gartner defines digitalisation as follows: “Digitalisation is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.” – http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/digitalization

When you build, or transform a business process into a digital one, Identity and Access Management will be one of the key technologies. Quite often when a digitalisation process starts, IAM is an afterthought – I hope I can explain why (Customer) IAM should be one of the key things to consider in the very beginning when planning a new digital business process. Let’s take a look how to avoid 3 very common mistakes in a digitalisation process by using Identity and Access Management.

Who is Your Customer?

When you transform or create a new digital business model, you should know who your target customers are. You have probably created different personas along the way when you’ve defined the new model. You have created strategies on how to lure them into your new revenue generator. You have targets for conversion rate, acquisition cost etc.

Mistake nr 1: You have already on your way to launch the new digital business model & service. You are super excited about the visuals and the flows implementing a shiny new digitalised business model / process. Then someone from your organisation points out that you have to build a registration flow, and a user database to capture and convert the visitors. And that you have to authenticate returning customers. Registration is one of the main reasons for abandonment, sometimes creating as high as 70% abandonment rates. On top of that you have to take consider regulations such as GDPR. Either you quickly task someone from the development team to create ad-hoc registration forms and a basic user database, or:

Solution nr 1: Customer IAM can allow your visitors to use something they already have. For conversion, it can be as simple as using social media identities. For more confidential services you can integrate trusted third party authentication methods that your customers use. This will make registration much easier, but also reduces the risk of non-compliance with e.g. GDPR when you use third party identities.

For your business customers you can allow them to Single Sign-On from their own corporate network to your new service. And with Customer IAM, you can outsource the management of your business customer identities to the customer organisation, increasing the accuracy of KYC.

New and Old – More Than a Single Service

A new digital service is seldom alone. It’s part of a bigger portfolio of services you have. Your customers will travel between these services. You might have services built on different platforms, or through acquisition or mergers your environment includes a mix of different services and platforms.

Mistake nr 2: A basic technology for a good user experience and customer journey is not considered; Single Sign-On. In an environment with more than 1 digital service, the requirement to authenticate again when moving from one service to another will create a very bad experience that can result in problems in customer retention. Just a side note: We were in the Digital Customer Experience Summit last year held in London, and based on the discussions with the delegates, we found out that this is a reality in many cases.

Solution nr 2: A proper Identity and Access Management solution that supports all the relevant WebSSO standards (SAML, WS-Federation, OpenID, OpenID Connect, OAuth) can provide the crucial feature for a much improved user experience and journey, increasing retention. For B2B services, the ability to offer SSO for a business customer from their own network will definitely increase the adoption of your services.

Know Thy Customer

Knowing your customers is different from knowing who you are targeting. Once a visitor has been converted into a paying customer, it will be important to know them. Especially in B2B cases Know Your Customer can prove to be difficult without a well thought Customer IAM solution.

Mistake nr 3: On a yearly basis 20-30% of CRM data goes bad. The simple reason for this is that your employees do not have visibility into the changes taking place in the customer organisation. Time is spent in customer service desk or in sales & marketing to hunt down correct contact persons as they’ve moved on within the customer organisation or have left. You need to resolve this.

Solution nr 3: Customer Identity and Access Management with a tiered delegated administration model and integration to your CRM will empower your customers to manage their own identities. When you delegate the administration task of identities, and especially authorisations, to your customer, your CRM data accuracy increases and thus your sales & marketing will become more efficient, customer service desk costs will be reduced and compliancy to regulation (GDPR) will be easier to achieve. Read the whitepaper on the benefits of CIAM and CRM integration.

During the years we have helped organisations in their efforts to digitalise new business processes / models or transform existing ones, we’ve noticed that there’s particular path almost all online services will follow. We’ve created a digitalisation maturity model based on that. It will give a clear indication where your organisation is on the path to the ultimate online service. Download it now, or contact us to hear how we can help you to create new revenue opportunities, reduce cost, improve conversion, comply to regulations and much more with a Customer Identity and Access Management solution.