Truly knowing the customer is the key to marketing success today. Not just knowing their name, but understanding their true identity. The technology that makes this possible is known as customer identity and access management (CIAM).
These solutions help companies acquire and recognise customers, collect accurate first-party data, and facilitate personalised marketing through integrations.
At its most basic level, a CIAM solution should offer the complete spectrum of capabilities related to delivering a secure, seamless customer experience.
>See also: The three elements to getting customer authentication right
This includes the ability to register customers, authenticate customers, manage identities, connect customers to internal and third-party applications, and scale across multiple customer bases, business units and partner offerings.
Getting customers to digital properties is one thing, but having them identify and engage with a brand is another. Whether through traditional registration (username and password) or social login, this is when visitors go from anonymous to known.
Once acquired, companies have the ability to collect rich demographic and psychographic profile information from their social login or registration method, building a powerful database of knowledge about your best customers.
Then, companies can amplify the power of their customers’ identities and turn that information into action by synchronising profile data with their email marketing system, CMS, web analytics, targeting, CRM, e-commerce and other marketing technologies already in use.
As marketers look deeper into customer identities, a richer, more meaningful set of marketing tactics becomes apparent. Capturing, storing and connecting customers’ data powers the next level of digital marketing, building the personalised journey.
>See also: 5 layers of customer identity
For example, imagine a frequent flyer is on an airline’s website researching tickets to Spain. She has a question and decides to call the airline. The airline’s system recognises her phone number and is able to connect the customer profile to her recent website activity.
The representative then asks if the customer is calling about the trip to Spain she was just researching online. A centralised approach to the registration of users thus allows continuity in the customer’s journey.
Sourced from Russell Loarridge, EMEA managing director, Janrain. Janrain is a customer identity management platform on the cloud. It helps companies build a unified view of their customers across all devices by collecting accurate customer profile data to power personalised marketing.
