Consumer Identity Management (CIM) or Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) is slowly becoming the core of modern Business because it allows businesses to create a single view of the customer, independent of how many systems are present.  This single view is very important when it comes to understanding the customer behavior, his purchase history, average purchase size and many more such variables that are increasingly becoming important with the expansion of the digital business.  Capabilities like user registration, social login and user profile management are the building blocks for providing a seamless user experience across multiple channels which is secure, unified and helps the business grow.

These are the 10 key aspects that need to be known about CIAM systems –

Scale and scalability – The Enterprise CIAM systems are immensely scalable.  The systems used by Google and Facebook can both support over 1billion users in terms of registration, authentication and system access control.

Directory services – CIAM directories are able to capture a lot of data about customers like names, locations, e-mail addresses, products or privacy preferences.  It is a purpose built repository optimized around consumer data.  These are almost like big data, CRM, MDM and identity management all coming together.

Identity aggregation – The CIAM system is capable of linking the entire consumer data from different databases, having different contexts and third party affiliates in a manner that enables the creation of consumer profiles of individuals, which are uniquely identifiable, in real time. These profiles can be used to create informed interactions with these individuals.

Earned identity support – The CIAM system usually has an environment, which is so user friendly and so trustworthy that the consumers want to register and voluntarily provide information.  The registration of the consumer or the consumer identity is a result of such a user experience and user interface design that consumer register because they want to.

Performance and latency – These systems should not be just able to store data but should also be able to exchange data and information with related services in near real time.  Site visitors and mobile apps need quick authentication and instant preference retrieval so that informed interactions can be made and consumers get an experience that they want to repeat.

Mobile access – Support for mobile platforms, BYOD, SaaS, and online banking is a must. Whatever platforms and apps consumers wish to engage like websites, web services, affiliate services, mobiles tablets and even wearable’s, they should be able to do the right thing from the start. CIAM systems should be able to support large number of interactions from the registered consumers.

The 3 P’s Permission, preferences and privacy – The CIAM systems should be able to deal with the consumers on their own terms, honor their wishes and keep their data secure.  Consumers should be invited to control the information they share, how and where it is to be used and with whom it is to be shared.

Privacy – This particular consideration has matured since the early days of e-commerce initiatives when “anything goes” was the privacy philosophy.   The exponential growth of online availability of personal information catalyzed privacy regulations and now even teenagers are looking for privacy as evident from the “have proliferated”, and even teenagers have become more attuned to privacy as evident from the popularity of Snap chat.  The CIAM implementation of an enterprise has to adhere to privacy regulations in all jurisdictions of its operations.  The CIAM systems for International organizations will have to adhere to multiple privacy policies based on the user’s location.  The privacy policies of the social login companies are even more stringent, which most vendors have to adhere to. (See the Social Registration portion of The Details section).

Self-service by user – CIAM systems have distributed management capabilities like self- service that gives control to consumers, allowing them to manage their privacy and preferences.

Registration and authentication – The CIAM system should be able to register and authenticate users conveniently and offer features that simplify the registration process.  It should support social sign on from services like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn.  It should also be able to build on the earlier interactions that the consumer would have had with the enterprise.  The consumer need not enter same information again and again.  They should also be allowed different levels of authorization for different value transactions.  This means easier registration and access for routine tasks and may be multi factor authentication for accessing private information.  Among other things it should allow for the following:

• Social registration, allowing users to bypass long data entry forms and register for an account via a social identity
• Progressive profiling, allowing the use of a short form for registering the customer and then incrementally gathering profile data over time
• Relevant data collection, registration forms and workflows which are customized to collect only relevant data

Consumer Engagement – The CIAM systems should allow the enterprise to engage with consumers at the level of their identity.  This means that the system should support give-to-get offers based on dynamic parameters like location or varying account balance.  As a case in the point, a changing identity attribute should be able to trigger context aware business offers, which In turn, might be enabled by attribute based access control.

A well-designed CIAM system will help the customers also.  It will help them to connect their things and themselves to an organization’s cross-channel digital offerings properly.  It will also facilitate new ways of customer engagement and value delivery.

An effective CIAM system works beyond accessing and building a relationship with the customer.  It establishes trust, which facilitates data sharing that supports ‘know your customer’ (KYC) regulations, cross marketing and business intelligence.

In current times, when business wars are being fought over consumer acquisition, retention and growth, the consumer identity data is being described as a veritable gold mine.  The enterprise CIAM systems are tools that offer a business advantage, because they help the organization make use of this data.  They are the single thread that has the potential to align marketing activities, security, privacy needs and governance.  They can provide the businesses the much-needed multi-directional balance between security, access, consumer experience and business growth.

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