Travel today looks very different from how it did pre-pandemic in many ways. You can skip the ticket desk or kiosk entirely at the airport if you’re flying light with a mobile boarding pass. Some hotels have “smart rooms” where guests can control their room experience from lighting to temperature by connecting a personal device. You no longer have to interact with hospitality staff at all if you don’t want to. This is thanks to the significant developments in CIAM solutions which the travel and hospitality industry has undergone.
The way customers experience travel services, as well as how those enterprises manage customer identities, has become a crucial consideration. CIAM is a critical component of this change, addressing challenges such as inconsistent user experiences and security while offering the potential for highly personalized customer interactions. Explore the role of CIAM solutions in the travel and hospitality sector, both at home and abroad, and how they are enabling the industry to keep up with changes.
Traditional CIAM Solutions in Travel and Hospitality
In the past, traditional CIAM in travel and hospitality often led to inconsistent user experiences. Travelers and vacationers frequently found themselves having to create separate accounts for every provider they used – airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and travel agencies, to name a few. This resulted in fragmented and siloed systems, each with their own identity systems, which, in turn, increased the attack surface and made it challenging to provide a seamless and secure experience for consumers.
Moreover, these disjointed systems made it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of customers’ preferences, behaviors, and expectations. Consequently, the lack of consumer insights hindered personalization efforts. Essentially, companies struggled to tailor their services and marketing to meet individual needs effectively. Businesses missed potential improvements to customer experience, resulting in unprofitable friction.
Achieving Both Customer Experience and Security
In today’s world, users expect a frictionless and secure experience when interacting with travel and hospitality services. The rise of technology-driven and digitized experiences, such as self-service kiosks, mobile check-in, facial recognition used for airplane boarding, and contactless payments, has set the bar high. Customers lash out when they lose the convenience of these features. However, you must deliver convenience without compromising on personal data security.
Additionally, the travel and hospitality industry also faces unique challenges. These include the integration of business and leisure travel, the increasing importance of experiences over possessions, and a surge in research-savvy travelers. Additional issues include ongoing staffing shortages, supply chain challenges, and rising costs that make necessary infrastructure upgrades more challenging. In such an environment, striking the right balance between customer experience and security is crucial. Managed CIAM solutions are the best way to achieve these directives.
Implications of Leveraging Managed CIAM Solutions
Leveraging managed CIAM services can be a game-changer for the travel and hospitality industry. These solutions help companies keep up with industry trends, provide automation and expert oversight, and offer a wide range of benefits:
Keep up with Industry Trends: The travel and hospitality sector is known for its fast-paced changes. Managed CIAM solutions ensure that companies stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies. This helps them remain competitive and relevant to their consumers.
Automation and Expert Oversight: Managed CIAM services provide automation to engage travelers with frictionless digital experiences. These systems capture valuable consumer insights. These are then integrated with the tech stack to enhance services and tailor marketing campaigns effectively.
Empower Frontline Employees: In a time when the travel and hospitality industry faces staffing shortages, managed CIAM services empower frontline employees to provide superior customer service. This can be done by simplifying processes, making relevant customer data readily available, and automating routine tasks.
Protect Consumer Data: Securing consumer data is paramount. Managed CIAM services offer enhanced security measures to safeguard customer data, including personal and financial information.
Improved Customer Experiences: The ultimate goal of CIAM solutions is to provide a seamless and highly personalized customer experience. With a managed CIAM system in place, customers can easily book flights, manage reservations, and access loyalty programs using a single account, eliminating the need for multiple logins and enhancing convenience.
Better Security: Managed CIAM services also deliver better security, ensuring that customer loyalty accounts for airlines, hotels, and other providers remain protected from cyber threats.
Deeper Consumer Insights: By centralizing and analyzing customer data, businesses can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their customers. This deeper insight enables them to provide better, more personalized customer experiences.
Leverage CIAM in your Organization
The travel and hospitality industry evolves rapidly, driven by technological advancements and shifting customer expectations. As travel and leisure merge, personalized experiences become the norm. Furthermore, as technology plays a more significant role, CIAM solutions have a crucial role. With the right CIAM strategy in place, your travel and hospitality business can continue to thrive in a changing world.
Contact a Simeio identity advisor and learn what the ideal CIAM solution looks like for your enterprise.
The pandemic nearly killed brick and mortar storefronts. Though they have not perished completely, the shift towards digital customer experience has reached a fever pitch. As such, businesses need to be investing into their digital outlets. This includes security concerns. Because each separate application is another expansion of potential attack surface, you need to look for a unified solution. CIAM solutions should be that answer.
This unified system relates more strongly to retail than perhaps any other industry. A robust CIAM solution offers you the means of establishing a solid centralized catalogue and multichannel digital storefront. It provides your customers with the self-service options which are the hallmark of competent digital marketplaces. Lastly, it offers them next-gen cybersecurity, placing a personalized perimeter around their individual identity to protect their sensitive information.
CIAM Solutions in User Experience
The impact of CIAM solutions starts long before a product reaches your shelves. It continues long after the product has been sold. By leveraging CIAM within your supply chain, your enterprise gains better visibility and control over your inventory. Linking every product to an identifier and connecting that to the customer who purchases it provides unprecedented recordkeeping. You might know this time-stamped record by another name: the blockchain.
Once your products are properly sorted by location, price, quantity, and any other pertinent information, your enterprise can link your in-store shoppers with their online experience. Many customers take features like real-time in-stock updates for granted. Lagging behind competitors in terms of quality-of-life features can quickly cause unfavorable comparisons. CIAM is concerned with customer satisfaction, and providing a good experience is the first and last step in growing customer loyalty.
What’s more, consolidating your information onto a centralized platform makes managing that information much easier. Siloed data solutions are clunky and prone to tripping each other up. Federated CIAM solutions keep everything under a single manageable lens. This enables smoother data entry, updates, and wipes. Besides moving your UI closer to a frictionless experience, these features can remove many headaches associated with regulatory compliance.
Enabling Customers through CIAM
Speaking of processes concerning the backend of the online retail process, a solid CIAM solution delivers substantial ROIs directly to the company. Firstly, there are the costs associated with producing a good UI which can be mitigated through CIAM investments. Not only is a CIAM solution going to provide you with a ready-made user interface for your internal users, but it will be primed and ready for use by your customers with minimal tweaking.
As previously stated, CIAM solutions also make systems more compliant with major regulations. CIAM meets many needs of EU-GDPR and PCI DSS automatically through collection of pertinent information, keeping it strictly confidential, and quickly deleting it should the need arise. PCI DSS violations can cost $1MN annually. Noncompliance with GDPR results in fines of €20 million or 4% of annual worldwide turnover.
Of course, the most obvious and enriching aspect of a CIAM solution comes in the form of self-service and automatic services. From user-driven password recovery to basic product searches, CIAM acts as a massive source of frictionless experience. This does not only make huge strides in improving customer experience. It also greatly reduces the cost and strain on your customer service staff. By eliminating issues at their source, they do not bother your customers or support staff in the first place.
Security Through CIAM Solutions
While mitigating cyber risks requires investment across your entire identity fabric, CIAM is a crucial security component therein. A 2022 Ping survey found that 43% of consumers have suffered from fraud due to identity theft. A customer who has a good experience might recommend your business. But a customer who had their information stolen because of your website will almost certainly become a bitter detractor.
But just because you have rails along a cliffside doesn’t mean a safety net isn’t also warranted. A strong CIAM solution includes strategies and programs for remediation and recovery in case of a data breach. If you pair the monitoring capabilities with the automatic policy enforcement capabilities of IGA, you can cover for customer information breaches. A unified security solution of this kind greatly aids an enterprise’s ability to reliably answer the six critical identity and access security questions. Thus, your customers receive an assurance of safety as well as service.
Frictionless security is rapidly becoming the new standard in customer experience. Features like adaptive MFA and SSO are two high-profile enablers in this regard. Your customers become much safer with them, but both actually enhance their experience instead of hindering them. SSO means they can reliably use interconnected apps while MFA provides scalable authentication protocols to aid in password recovery and similar happenings.
Though the attributes of successful CIAM solutions are universal, their implementation is unique to each enterprise. The scale, optimal tools, and budget of an identity rollout can often be difficult if not impossible for a business to carry out themselves. A managed identity service can assess your current state, implement their expert solutions, and maintain your identity fabric at peak performance.
Miss Mary Malkovich is having a bad day. Her dog, Blevins, has chewed up her checkbook and she needs a replacement. She tries to access her bank account online, but a forgotten password leads to a drawn-out verification process. Mary finally gets in but notices that her address is incorrect. A lack of a self-service option forces her to call up a representative. Then Blevins chews through the cord of her computer. She drives 20 miles to her nearest bank branch to get her issue resolved. There, she learns that her account has been targeted for fraud. She goes back home to get her birth certificate and passport to verify her identity.
Blevins has chewed them both up.
Besides needing a way to stop Blevins, Mary desperately needs a bank with a proper Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution. Do not neglect the role of CIAM services in finance. They encapsulate user experience, account security, and efficient performance. Yet all too often it is taken for granted that customers should expect to have a bad time at the bank. You can stand out among a sea of mediocre customer experiences by instituting proper CIAM services.
CIAM Services in Finance Eases Friction
CIAM services in finance cover the full range of user experience. One of the most important and underserved are the needs of customer onboarding. Account creation is often the first interaction a customer has with an enterprise. An accessible pipeline goes a long way on many fronts. A well-designed user interface results in better retention and fewer drop-offs in the middle of the process. Additionally, it increases the chances of a customer entering accurate information as their attention is not focused on frustrations. This also applies to properly wiping sensitive personal data during off-boarding, providing an additional layer of security.
After establishing an account, the business must build a good rapport with the customer. Each login is an opportunity for a customer to think more highly of your service. It also might be unpleasant enough to make them wonder if they would be better off elsewhere. A well-made CIAM platform should include self-service support, automated curation, secure monitoring, unobtrusive security patches, SSO, and MFA. These features, despite being highly technical, have a direct impact on the average customer. They avoid common pain points such as service calls, excessive alerts, and disruptions in service.
Of course, the best thing you can do for your customers is keep their sessions as short and simple as possible. This is why robust self-service is so crucial. Instituting a suitable self-service apparatus requires extensive work by User Experience (UX) experts. Additionally, substantial consideration must be given to what information a customer shares with your systems. Do not ask for anything more than the absolute minimum of personal data, as every piece of information is one more prize for a potential hacker. A well executed CIAM solution enhances security at the same time it improves the quality of customer care.
CIAM Services in Finance Mean Security You Can Brag About
The benefits of CIAM services in finance extend to the realm of security as much as they do for convenience. A report by Veritis Transcend found that consumer customers lose an average of $1,446 per financial fraud incident. Business customers lose even more, suffering average losses of $10,312 per incident. The best breaches never happen; breach prevention should be the first of many layered defenses. Active and automated monitoring helps safeguard important data. By setting a perimeter around each identity, enterprises can cover the whole of their identity apparatus, instituting protections on every part of an attack surface.
However, hackers are always trying to find a way in. Despite best efforts, humans will slip up which demands quick remediation. The first part of remediation is instituting a set of parameters around what constitutes suspicious behavior. Engaging with a managed identity service is a good first step towards this end. The next is active monitoring for suspicious activity and notifying both to the customer and to the enterprise the instant it happens. In this way, CIAM achieves greater security and performance at the same time.
Finally, users need quick support to secure their identities. As stated, self-service should be a given. It gives direct feedback to a user that their sensitive data and assets are secure. Self-service also allows customers to attend to a problem much more quickly than waiting on an employee. Of course, active customer support by helpdesk employees should also be in the cards. However, CIAM helps on that front as well by making verification and authentication information easily accessible and verifiable by employees.
User Experience is for Partners and Employees Too
Your investments into CIAM are more versatile than you might realize. With the right planning, you can utilize your CIAM investments across different sectors of your enterprise. Many think of CIAM in finance as purely customer driven. But, when paired with a larger IAM platform, the impact the system has on your partners and employees may surprise you. This may seem counterintuitive when the prevailing corporate mindset focuses on stretching employees to the limits of their value. However, providing your internal users with as good of a system as you give your customers is not only possible, but surprisingly straightforward.
The legwork has already been done on creating a good experience for identity management for your customers. That same system, albeit with delineated roles and privileges, can be utilized internally. Such an integration also enhances your overall risk posture. Your business should already have substantial security capabilities via a strong IAM platform. Through integration with an IGA and PAM apparatus, your AM and CIAM systems become much more secure. Breach events become more easily clamped down on and remediated.
CIAM services clearly demonstrates the adage that what is good for the customer is good for the business. By investing in necessary IAM platforms, your enterprise stands to improve UX, customer security, and internal efficiency. Financial institutions survive on their ability to convince customers that their service is the best option available. You are in an environment where your competitors can easily make the CIAM investments you might pass over. All it takes is a little word of mouth or a publicized breach to lose customer confidence. Choose to build that trust instead.
The complicated task of creation, implementation, and management of a CIAM solution frequently leads to flawed and unscalable systems. This lesson is often learned only after hundreds of thousands of dollars have been sunk into a subpar CIAM. By considering the tangible benefits, both immediate and long-term, of Managed CIAM Services, you can avoid costly fumbling and start enjoying the fruits of an expertly-tuned CIAM in the span of a few short months.
The Failings of Traditional CIAM
Traditional CIAM structures, even as far back as paper-only records, have been defined by manual recordkeeping. These outmoded models cost workhours, cause inefficiencies, and neglect regulatory compliance. More than anything, the majority of CIAM solutions will only focus on either customer experience or security, satisfying one while neglecting the other.
To make the customer experience as frictionless as possible many practices forgo vital security safeguards in favor of stopgaps. Their advantage of ubiquity across multiple vendors and platforms makes them attractive for wide scale adoption. MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) was implemented as a quick and easy solution for cyberattacks but has since been proven ineffective. SMS or email OTP (One Time Password) are likewise vulnerable to phishing and fatigue.
Passwordless authentication and identity-proofing addresses this issue, but adoption has not yet reached the levels necessary for easy universal use. In the immediate term most strong security measures prove inconvenient to the average customer, and inconvenience is the bane of a positive customer experiences.
Another glaring flaw with unmanaged customer identity and access is lack of maintenance. System experts leave the company and programs grow dangerously obsolete. Even when a new system is implemented, much of the old data is in danger of being lost. An effective CIAM service provider ensures that while setting up a CIAM program, the focus is not just on migrating legacy databases but also scaling them as the enterprise develops and evolves.
How Managed CIAM Services Improve Efficiency and Security
Managed CIAM services remediate the failings of traditional CIAM program through automation and expert oversight. One of the most effective fixes is enabling self-service. Without self-service, customers must contact their provider every time they have an issue, taking up both their own time and the provider’s resources. A well-designed self-service apparatus, consistently cut back on client service desk calls.
On the security side, traditional privacy management uses manual and siloed authentication services prone to customer friction. Internal automated management solutions strengthen security and boosting efficiency through delegation of management authority. This works especially well in organization with multiple offices, wherein a single and centralized identity fabric replaces the insular solutions of individual offices.
The KPIs of your managed CIAM service depend upon your industry, but all share the same easy-to-quantify metrics. A finance firm might just want to check the compliance box. A government agency could want to reduce support calls by a certain number. A retailer might focus on their conversion rate of browsing-to-paying customers. A managed CIAM service fulfills all three goals for all three businesses at the same time.
Managed CIAM services really shine with scalability and monitoring. Maintaining, futureproofing, addressing security patches, and generally keeping up with evolving needs is a constant endeavor. The challenges of operation are more daunting than implementation, hence why so many companies rely on Simeio’s expert curation.
How the Challenges of Managed CIAM Services are Overcome
This is not to say that managed CIAM service is not without challenges, but the best providers have become experts in solving them. A trap many users fall into is the siren song of loyalty programs, incentivizing customers to create one account after another. It is much better to use a ubiquitous SSO account, where only one login is needed to access features.
Many organizations use SSO to centralize their logins, allowing users of their services to access their music, game library, and all other records from a single pane. SSO cuts down on fraud protection steps while paradoxically increasing security (fewer credentials means a smaller attack surface).
Another challenge is compromising on features during the selection of managed CIAM services vendors. Fortunately, excellent CIAM offerings of Okta, Ping, and Forgerock can be yours in a single package. The key is in combining these feature that sets it into a single highly customizable platform optimized for your unique needs and KPIs.
An identity orchestration platform comes bundled with CIAM, taking on helpdesk in such a way that protects privacy while ensuring permissions are given to those who need to have it, easy to grant and track. Orchestration allows for quick and easy migration of legacy data, providing relief on a major pain point endemic to managed CIAM services.
If you want to assess your need for end to end CIAM services, Simeio employs a dedicated staff of experts to fulfill your unique requirements instead of straightjacketing your enterprise with a one-size-fits-all model. Customizations including data collection and storage, application onboarding, and company branding are just a few reasons to start building your Simeio services package.
How customers interact with your business is critical—it can spur customer engagement or lead to customer churn. In the physical world, those interactions may happen at a counter with a salesperson. But in cloud computing, mobile applications, and eCommerce, it starts with digital access.
For consumers, websites and mobile apps are often the entry points for their business and social activities. Those entry points must be secure to prevent account hijacking and fraud. However, they must achieve those goals without creating hurdles that hamper user adoption. Organizations are turning to Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solutions to meet this challenge.
Balancing user experience and security
It is an old IT problem—making security an enabler of the business rather than a source of friction. From single sign-on to MFA, in 2023, solving the privacy, security, and user experience issues around customer identities will be a critical priority for digitized businesses.
Historically, when it comes to managing customer identities, those concerned with user experience and those focused on secure login, are the two divided camps. There is an inherent push-pull here—implementing security mechanisms creates friction, and too much friction can turn customers away. For sales teams and others, the urge to loosen security to improve ease of use will always exist.
A new balance needs to be struck, and security teams must collaborate effectively with different stakeholders than those involved with employee IAM. Rather than Human Resources, for example, they may work with the marketing and customer support teams. As a result, the conversations around the project will also be different. Instead of detailed discussions about job roles and segregation of duties, the focus is more likely to be on supporting various types of devices. The goal is to make the authentication process as simple as possible.
Understanding the Type of MFA that fits your need
A focal point of these discussions often turns to multifactor authentication (MFA). While passwords are still ubiquitous, there is a growing awareness that more is needed. However, another question soon emerges: what type of MFA should our organization implement? MFA should involve something you know, such as a password, and something you have, like a fingerprint or a secure challenge to a mobile device. Both factors should be from different categories.
It may be tempting to rely on email or SMS as a second factor, as it is easy to use and set up, but it could be more attractive from a security perspective. Email accounts may be poorly protected, and message routing can be intercepted. SMS is also prone to attacks like SIM hijacking or SMS fatigue. NIST recommends neither method of MFA being effective and steps to move away from these approaches. It is necessary to find a technique for MFA that doesn’t require an IT consultant to be present at your customer’s device to set it up.
This tension between usability and security forces organizations to look for two-factor approaches which improve security posture without sacrificing seamless experience. Biometrics is one answer. Although many organizations leverage the native capabilities of the device, using it to capture the user’s fingerprint, for example, and then using it to unlock the necessary credentials. Another approach is the introduction of end-to-end flows that work with the upfront validation of the user. Here, the user leverages MFA as part of the registration process so that the initial verification of the user also involves MFA. This strategy serves to augment the use of MFA when the user logs into a service by providing an extra layer of proof of their identity.
Take, for example, a user that attempts to register for a service for the first time and is asked for their driver’s license to verify they are whom they say they are. The photo on the driver’s license can then be compared to a selfie provided by the user. A service provider can even take it a step further and perform a liveness check by prompting the user to turn their head or smile.
Device characteristics are also used to verify identity. However, these capabilities often need to be more mature. Basic capabilities can lead to mistakes, such as misidentifying a device as new simply because of its own downloaded software update for a web browser. An additional layer of friction has been added unnecessarily. A similar situation would be if the device uses a different IP address and is therefore unrecognized.
Align CIAM program with customer experience
No matter what approach organizations take towards CIAM, it will require a strategy that sacrifices as little security as possible and encourages user engagement. Your CIAM program should be in sync with your business objectives for customer experience. At Simeio, we help organizations reach their goals by providing CIAM as a managed service on the Simeio Identity Orchestrator platform.
While discussions about identity management are typically centered on employees, failing to protect consumers’ identities can be just as damaging to a business. Providing a user experience that is seamless and secure is one New Year’s resolution that enterprise leaders should prioritize in the coming year.
Improved customer trust and loyalty are two major outcomes of digital transformation programmes. Trust has often been the number one concern for most customers when sharing their personal data. There is an increased awareness among customers about how identities can be misused, accessed without authorisation, and misuse of their personal information without their consent. How organisations manage their customers’ digital identities is a critical part of their overall trust in their brand. As a customer base grows, so does the attack surface, which often the result of upgrades, updates and completed in haste due to the lack of a proper Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) programme.
Protect Customer Identities to Win their Trust and Loyalty
Simeio is proud to be a UK Finance Associate Member supporting digital identity. We provide a secure way to access services, confirm identity, manage data, control access, and maintain user privacy.
In a recent UK Finance webinar co-presented by Simeio and Ping Identity, it was found that 53% of organisations that attended, view that the digital experience for their customers is merely functional – not scalable nor providing a memorable digital experience, entirely matured indicating existence of potential gaps. The same survey found that 44% organisations said their customers have a common set of main credentials but require additional credentials for special apps. This may be a tedious process for customers!
To view the UK Finance webinar “Transforming Digital Customer Engagement with Identity” with Simeio and Ping Identity, please download the on-demand recording video here.
One of the success parameters of digital transformation should be simplifying the processes of customer identity management and increased customer trust by reducing friction through an improved digital user experience. This can only be achieved with a well planned and executed CIAM program.
Why CIAM?
CIAM plays a critical role in in Knowing Your Customer (KYC) programme, where applications are expected to serve up services to authorised customers and have the control on providing and maintaining their information. CIAM benefits customers and drives conversions. The business also benefits, as CIAM provides deep customer insights. In addition, developers can speed the app development by focusing on the functionality of the application and not so much on the user management and security layer.
A few key measurements quantify the advantages of Customer Identity Access Management. These include the average time it takes to convert prospects into first-time consumers of your financial products. Additional indicators of success include a reduction in customer churn, lowering the cost of customer acquisition, or reducing risk and fraudulent activity. However, creating a single view of the user, enabling a seamless customer experience, and meeting regulatory compliance is no easy task for any organisation. This requires highly integrated and efficient technologies, processes, and personnel.
In the above-mentioned webinar, 50% who attended felt their organisation’s digital transformation resulted in lot of processes that they could get more efficient at.
Implementing Effective CIAM
An effective way to eliminate this complexity and add value is partnering with an identity services provider with a cutting edge CIAM technology. Simeio offers a CIAM service powered by Ping Identity that combines years of engineering effort with real-world know how.
At Simeio we understand the established nature of your Open Banking / PSD2 journey is well. But what is your strategy to scale? We are here to help you to not only thrill your customers but nurture a long- term relationship to build your brand equity. We integrate our Open Banking platforms with industry leading technical solutions from Ping Identity, to ensure that the security, reliability, performance, and responsiveness are all top of class for your deployment. Check out our CIAM offerings on Open Banking platforms.
Simeio offers assessment sessions to review organisations’ identity maturity level. This would start by considering user communities, then the applications current and planned for those communities and assessing the readiness of an organisation’s digital processes to support their go-to-market plans.
Simeio is a UK Finance Associate Member supporting digital identity in financial services and other industries.
