New digital channels and the changing customer relationship has led to more customer and user interactions. Organisations are now tasked with ensuring every customer journey is frictionless and secure. Simultaneously, importance is being placed on understanding and managing complex user identities. In this new world, identifying users the moment that they interact with platforms and creating secure, personalised, omnichannel experiences is fundamental for creating customer loyalty and outpacing the competition.

But what scalable approaches are available to organisations to power and weave together secure, simple and seamless customer and user journeys? Nimbus Ninety, in partnership with Ping Identity, brought together senior technology leaders to discuss how to create, test and optimise omnichannel experiences while enjoying a curated wine tasting.

BUILDING WORLD-CLASS ONLINE JOURNEYS TO DRIVE GROWTH

To kick off discussions Maté Barany, Regional Solution Architect at Ping Identity, explored the role that identity plays in personalisation, a complex component of digital transformation journeys that our members have embarked upon. Maté encouraged members to draw inspiration from everyday examples such as standardisation within open banking or the ability of streaming services, such as Netflix, to provide seamless omnichannel experiences. Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), in these examples, acts as a bridge between delivering security and user experience. In this sense, CIAM is not just about technology, it is a platform to design, modify and personalise experiences more easily.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Members then broke into a roundtable discussion. The key takeaways were:

• New channels challenge the security-experience balance

The event poll showed that 70% of members are concerned with how the emergence of new channels and journeys is challenging the balance between security and customer experience. For instance, security played a particular part for members from the public sector, where securing confidential and sensitive information is paramount. In contrast, other members were more focused on ensuring form-factor change did not impact on customer experience. A consensus emerged for omnichannel personalisation: get standardised security processes sorted first then explore the experience next. 

• Identity is key

The attending members, from across different industries and sectors, all face specific challenges and considerations when it comes to personalisation. For instance, public sector organisations are facing diverse demographics, vulnerable citizens and tight budgets. Healthcare organisations are facing new customer expectations from obtaining digital vaccine passports to providing virtual GP dropins. Other experts, from defence to financial services, are challenged with creating coherent and consistent internal business services across large, multi-stakeholder, multi-location and multi-method organisations. 

• Hyper-personalisation fears

Members also mentioned drawing a clear line between hyper-personalisation and commercialisation of data. Transparency and consent as part of the customer journey, especially when it comes to sensitive data, are key to building customer trust and loyalty. Members agreed the solution to this challenge is ensuring data adds value for customers.

• Designing and testing customer/user journeys

Members also shared ideas around how to design and test new customer journeys. Some members, towards the end of their digital transformation journey, were carrying out complex testing to identify those minute gaps within their diverse range of customer journeys. Others are working through preliminary steps of identifying personas and funnel journeys. Either way, the first step in designing and testing user journeys is identifying what is not accessible, seamless or secure.

We held this event in partnership with Ping Identity, a CIAM solutions provider.