Learn More About Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software
What is Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software?
Businesses use customer identity and access management (CIAM) software to create user-friendly, seamless customer experiences when users register for, log in to, and manage their customer profiles on corporate websites, portals, shops, and other consumer-facing accounts. On the back end, CIAM software creates one universal identity of the user, which can be tied to multiple business applications. Having a single, centralized view of the user is critical for creating a seamless end-user experience and properly managing a user’s preferences across all of a company’s customer products. Companies also employ CIAM for security reasons, protecting customer data at rest and in transit. CIAM software is important for B2C companies in particular, with us -cases such as travel loyalty programs, cable company customer accounts, content subscription accounts (including online newspapers, food delivery accounts, and clothing stores), and many more. Although most CIAM software use cases are for business to consumer (B2C) businesses, there are some CIAM use cases for business to business (B2B) companies; for example, businesses that manage internet of things (IoT) device identities may use CIAM software to provide devices with unique identities for security purposes.
Key Benefits of Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software
- Improve online customer experiences by creating easy-to-use online registration, login, and account management tools
- Manage customer identities at scale, into the tens of millions
- Allow user self-registration and management
- Authenticate user identities to reduce fraud
- Manage user consent and privacy to stay compliant with privacy laws
- Connect with CRM, content management systems (CMS), analytical software, and other tools to personalize customer experiences and/or discover upselling opportunities
- Provide security function like encryption to secure customer data at rest and in transit
Why Use Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software?
Great customer experiences lead to happy customers. Companies use CIAM software to provide their customers with simple and secure access to their own accounts, effectively managing the back end of these customer user identities.
The main benefit of using CIAM software is to provide an improved customer experience. Companies can leverage the software to accomplish this through creating a simple self-registration process, providing secure login portals using authentication methods, and facilitating seamless access to multiple products using a singular identity. CIAM software also helps companies adhere to privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by tracking and managing a user’s consent and privacy preferences and applying those preferences across all of a user’s accounts globally.
There are four main reasons why companies use CIAM software:
Improved customer experience — Positive customer experiences are critical for companies to gain customers’ trust, brand loyalty, and their repeat business. Part of a B2C company’s digital strategy for consumer-facing accounts is to offer a front-end solution that makes account creation user-friendly, login secure and seamless, and account management easy. On the back end, this means creating a holistic view of the customer under one identity that can be federated across multiple corporate systems to provide a frictionless end-user experience. The CIAM solution should be omnichannel, such as being available on web, mobile apps, and other places customers can interact with the company. With improved customer experiences online, companies can see reductions in phone calls, emails, or in-person visits for account help.
Marketing — Companies can reduce friction and customer abandonment by providing excellent customer experiences online. Part of doing so is providing the right customer, with the right information, at the right time; this kind of experience can be achieved with personalization. With CIAM solutions, companies can bring their siloed customer identity data from across all of their systems into one central place. They can enrich that centralized customer data with outside information and generate a 360-degree view of the user. With this holistic view of the customer, personalization can be better achieved.
Security — Companies use CIAM software to support their security policies, verify users are who they say they are, and secure customer data across its consumer lifecycle. When customers log in to an account, it is important to authenticate their identity. CIAM software offers multiple forms of authentication for security—from basic SMS authentication for low-risk account actions, to biometric authentication for high-risk transactions such as transfering money or making large purchases. Some CIAM providers may offer adaptive, or risk-based multi-factor authentication, which can determine risk based on a number of factors such as IP address, location, and device behavior, and even prompt a user to reauthenticate once a reauthentication policy is triggered.
Privacy — In addition to security, compliance with privacy laws is top of mind for many companies—and it starts with gaining user consent. Using CIAM software, companies can allow users to manage their consent, privacy, and other preferences online. These preferences can then be implemented across all a company’s applications and systems, and be recorded for auditing purposes.
Who Uses Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software?
Typically B2C companies use CIAM software to manage up to millions of customer identities for their accounts. Some CIAM software providers also offer tools to manage internet of things (IOT) devices as well, allowing the provision of a unique identity to each device that can be used across accounts.
To properly implement, manage, and extract value from a CIAM solution, businesses will likely seek collaboration from teams across the company including: security, operations, marketing, sales, service, and customer support. Users must ensure that the needs of all stakeholders from these groups can be met with the CIAM solution the company ultimately selects.
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software Features
The main features of CIAM software include:
Self-registration — Customer account self-registration is crucial to CIAM software. CIAM tools offer workflow functionality to complete the necessary business processes throughout the customer onboarding process.
Authentication methods — Another major feature of CIAM tools is authenticating the user; in other words, ensuring they are who they say they are. Many CIAM tools offer multiple authentication methods, including but not limited to social login, two-factor authentication (2FA), multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometric authentication, and passwordless authentication.
Single sign-on (SSO) — Single sign-on functionality using SAML or OpenID Connect standards provides customers with seamless access to disparate applications by logging in only once.
Multi-channel/omnichannel experience — Part of a business’ ability to provide excellent customer experience is meeting customers where they are, whether that is in a physical store, on the web, or via mobile apps. Having a customer’s identity synchronized across all channels helps a business provide a better experience to that customer.
Privacy and consent management — Managing a customer’s consent and privacy preferences is critical to being compliant with privacy laws such as CCPA, GDPR, and others. Companies can more easily collect and manage a user’s consent preferences using CIAM solutions.
Integrations/APIs — To monetize the information stored in a CIAM software solution, a CIAM must connect to the company’s other software including CRM platforms, marketing automation tools, analytics tools, and others. Many CIAM providers achieve this via API integrations.
Reporting — Reporting functionality is important to understand registration information, security information, and general customer information that can be used for analytics.
Scalability — Today, most solutions can handle identities in the tens of millions. A CIAM software solution should be scalable during periods of high usage or growth.
Standards — Technological standards vary from business to business. CIAM solutions can be built on many, including OpenID, SAML, OAuth, WebAuthn/FIDO2, and so on.
Security — CIAM providers should offer encryption of data at both rest and in transit, and allow levels of control who has access to customer data. Many CIAM solutions have certifications such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA, among others.
Potential Issues with Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software
Authentication — By themselves, usernames and passwords are generally not considered sufficient means of authenticating a user’s identity. Many CIAM solutions offer more robust authentication methods, including mobile-push on mobile apps or passwordless authentication.
Identity and access management (IAM) — CIAM can often be confused with IAM, but the two solution types are different. IAM software is used for managing employee identities, while CIAM is used for managing customer identities. Furthermore, IAM-related identities are managed by a company’s IT staff, while CIAM-related identities are created and managed by end users such as customers. CIAM software is more robust and offers marketing and privacy-related features that are not native to IAM software.
Software and Services Related to Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Software
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) software — Properly authenticating users—to ensure they are who they say they are—is an important part of CIAM software. CIAM solutions should offer multiple methods to authenticate users which may include: SMS one-time-passwords (OTP), email OTPs, voice OTPs, mobile push, physical security keys, smartphones, smartwatches, biometrics, QR codes, and passwordless authentication.
Passwordless authentication software— Passwordless authentication is a type of muti-factor authentication (MFA) that eliminates a password as an authentication type and replaces it with other, more secure factors such as mobile-push or biometrics.
Single sign-on (SSO) software — SSO functionality provides users with access to multiple applications without requiring multiple logins. SSO allows companies to provide a seamless customer experience by requiring the customer to log in only once and then linking multiple applications together on the back end.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software — CRM software helps businesses track and manage customer interactions within a single system of record. By integrating CRM software with CIAM software, companies can get a holistic view of their customer for customer service or upselling purposes.
Marketing automation software — Marketing automation software helps marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects. By integrating marketing automation software with CIAM software, companies can extract personalization data from the CIAM to personalize their marketing campaigns to ensure the right customer gets the right marketing message at the right time.
Marketing analytics software — Marketing analytics software helps to simplify and optimize a business’ marketing strategies and activities. By integrating CIAM data into a marketing analytics platform, companies can ensure they are using the most accurate customer data.
Consent management platforms (CMP) — Consent management platforms help companies obtain and manage user consent when collecting, sharing, buying, or selling a user's data online. Many CIAM tools offer consent management functionality, but businesses may opt to integrate with a separate, more comprehensive CMP to better meet their needs..
