IDENTITY IS THE CENTER OF OMNICHANNEL SUCCESSFUL BRANDS KNOW THEIR CUSTOMERS AND OPTIMIZE THEIR EXPERIENCE. WHITE PAPER

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1 IDENTITY IS THE CENTER OF OMNICHANNEL SUCCESSFUL BRANDS KNOW THEIR CUSTOMERS AND OPTIMIZE THEIR EXPERIENCE.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW THE NEW NORM OMNICHANNEL ISN T MULTICHANNEL THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS SUFFERING HOW TO BRIDGE THE GAP OPEN THE DOOR... CENTRALIZED CONTROL EXAMINE A SINGLE VIEW OF THE CUSTOMER IT S ALL ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE THE USER EXPERIENCE INCLUDES AUTHENTICATION THE SOLUTION FOR SECURING IDENTITY IN THE OMNICHANNEL 2

3 EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Omnichannel. Contrary to popular belief, it isn t synonymous with multichannel. It s a new perspective on delivering the optimum brand experience to your customers, partners, and stakeholders by seamlessly integrating every channel, rather than parsing it out in a dozen different disconnected platforms. Omnichannel represents a fundamental shift in the best practices of the last decade where multiple screens are a 90% certainty for most consumers throughout the day. To provide a consistent end-to-end experience, this integrated infrastructure must be driven by a single view of customers and rich behavioral insights. This data allows businesses to hone in on customers that offer the highest lifetime value. But how do you pull it all together? Secure single sign-on (SSO). Scalable access. Centralized control. Intelligence. In a word: identity. This paper covers the benefits of adding an identity layer to bridge the gaps of simplified access, multiple entry points and authentication, dramatically improving the customer experience. 3

4 THE NEW NORM How does your brand interact with your customers? Social media? Online? Direct mail? Broadcast? Live customer service? No matter how many options you offer, consumers don t see channels they see a brand. One brand. One expectation. If it works here, it should work over there. A promise made on your site should be delivered in-store. We re all aware that how and where consumers interact with their chosen brands depends on circumstance. The mass migration to mobile paired with increasingly savvy and fickle consumers has created an ever-changing landscape where brands must step up (and often catch up) to deliver a frictionless experience across every channel or risk losing customers to the brands that do. If you don t believe it, ask anyone who has unsuccessfully tried to use a brand s app or mobile site if one even exists. In a Google study of consumer behavior, 90% of consumers use multiple screens in the same day, whether sequentially (e.g., smartphone > PC > tablet) or simultaneously (TV + smartphone, PC + smartphone, TV + laptop) 1. Both of these activities have a direct impact on how consumers interact with brands. SEQUENTIAL USAGE Moving from one device to another at different times to accomplish a task SIMULATENOUS USAGE Using more than one device at the same time for either a related or an unrelated activity. MULTI-TASKING: Unrelated activity COMPLIMENTARY USAGE: Related activity Consider an example where a consumer begins their buying journey by seeing something that they like on a television program. While still watching the program, they search for the item on their tablet. Having found what they were looking for, they pin the item, so they can look for a place to purchase it later that day. At work, the consumer uses a PC to call up the pinned item and searches for the best price. There are several retailers with the item at competitive prices, and the consumer finds it in stock at a retail store that has a local presence. Because it s an expensive item, the consumer decides to visit the local retail store to see the item in person. Noticing that there was a special offer for online purchases, the consumer completes the purchase on their smartphone while they are still in the retail store. 4

5 In this example, not only has the consumer moved sequentially through multiple screens in the same day, they have also interacted with both brands (the item and the store) in multiple channels before completing their purchase. It s easy to see from this example how brands that address the experience from a consumercentric perspective will win. And, while this example focused on a shopping scenario, focusing on the customer experience doesn t just have implications for retail. Similar sequential-screening/multiple-channel scenarios play out across financial services, travel, education, and other industries every day. OMNICHANNEL ISN T MULTICHANNEL When the term omnichannel first began to make the rounds, many grumbled that it was just another way of talking about multichannel and many still hold that belief today. However, both retail and financial services have demonstrated that omnichannel is decidedly not a new flavor of multichannel. Why? Omnichannel requires a completely different way of looking at customer interaction, and the infrastructure designed to support every brand interaction with that customer. Going back to the days when your only choices were word-of-mouth, radio and newspaper, multichannel has always been about bolting on the newest channels and encouraging customers to interact with a brand through the most appropriate channel to accomplish their activity. Sometimes most appropriate was based on customer needs, oftentimes it was based on whatever was most convenient (or inexpensive) to the brand. This also explains how some channels were ignored until they caught on in the eyes of the brand, making it worthwhile to explore. But whether it was the jump from radio to television or the leap from television to online branding and customer interaction, what began to happen is that these channels grew in their own silos, with little to no cross-channel infrastructure connecting them. In some cases channels were actually re-branded acquisitions with wholly separate infrastructures. Sound familiar? Not surprising. This is the way many organizations have done it for years. By contrast, omnichannel demands an integrated infrastructure focused on creating an end-to-end customer experience. This means customers will benefit from a fluid experience, regardless of when or how they interact with brands, receiving contextually relevant advice, pricing, and offers along their journey. It also means that brands can benefit from a single view of their customers, deepening customer insights, and allowing them to focus on customers that provide the highest lifetime value. So, how is a fragmented approach to channels impacting your customer relationships? 5

6 THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS SUFFERING Most companies have grown over time, bolting each new channel (or acquired product/brand/app) onto legacy platforms. With each new addition, the probability that an individual customer exists in multiple channels, applications and brands as disconnected identities in different directories proliferates. Not only does this leave companies with an inability to understand each customer in their entirety, it also means they have no ability to guide customers through a fluid, connected journey. IDENTITY STORES ALL APPLICATIONS CLOUD USER PROFILE SOCIAL DIRECTORY WAM As a result, the customer experience suffers. In the worst scenario, the customer can t easily get from one application to another from the same brand, or to a white-labeled partner offering within a branded site without re-establishing their identity credentials and being re-authenticated. Even in the best scenarios, where customers can move through a site, accessing multiple partner offerings under a single set of identity credentials, with a single authentication point, they can be frustrated at the need to re-authenticate with payment credentials during checkout, or the lack of understanding where they left off in a task on a brand s mobile application when they later pick up the same task on the brand s website. At the core of these poor experiences is the reality that most enterprises have a large number of users coming in from many different access points (devices, channels, etc.) tied to different identity stores, who are trying to access a growing number of applications, websites, and services. There s a fundamental cross-channel gap in how customers are experiencing brands. 6

7 HOW TO BRIDGE THE GAP Knowledge about consumer behavior and expectations is key. With the move toward an omnichannel experience, enterprises need a single, centralized view of the customer in order to deliver a unified, secure and frictionless experience. SSO to applications through federated identity is a solid start to enhancing the customer experience, but it isn t where the enterprise customer identity strategy should end. To deliver on the omnichannel promise, enterprises need to leverage the next-generation identity layer to be able to: Give customers access on their terms across any device, in any channel. Maintain and control customer identities across many different identity stores. Create and deliver a single view of the customer from across multiple identity stores. Bridge identities from different access points and identity stores to grant the customer access to a broad range of applications, properties, and services. Achieve this in a scalable way. OPEN THE DOOR... It s no secret that customers are unhappy with the current state of access and authentication to the vast majority of sites and applications they interact with today. Not a week goes by that there isn t a rant in the blogosphere or mainstream media about consumer contempt for current login methods, particularly passwords and the seemingly endless proliferation of them. This contempt leads to insecure practices (with consumers reusing passwords across multiple websites) and high abandonment rates (inability to remember a password and giving up, or just not wanting to create yet another login they have to remember), costing enterprises revenue and exposing security risks. Providing customers the ability to use a known, trusted login (e.g., Facebook, Google, PayPal, student ID, etc.) reduces friction and delivers a simple experience from the outset. 7

8 CENTRALIZED CONTROL Because there s real risk in controlling access and authorization what customers can do or see--when do you need to add an additional layer of authentication? For example, perhaps a customer can log in to their mobile banking application via a third-party credential. But if they wanted to do anything beyond viewing account balances, they would need to step up to a higher level of authentication. This type of central control becomes a key concept in the identity layer. Enterprises need to separate the notion of identity and authentication from their applications, and begin placing it into a central process. Authentication, as a standalone business process unto itself, allows for extensibility to accommodate different authentication factors that are emerging over time to deal with different channels, as well as the ability to have a single control point across multiple business units. EXAMINE A SINGLE VIEW OF THE CUSTOMER It s not practical to force your customers to link all of their different identities across your properties into a single identity. But there s value in knitting together the bits and pieces of who that customer is and what you know about them from each discrete identity store, to create a single view of the customer, resulting in a unified source of truth about your customers. A single view of the customer results in: REDUCED OPEX Minimize operating costs and duplication with a centralized, reusable identity data architecture. INCREASED LOYALTY Enable more personalized engagements with customers, increasing loyalty and lifetime customer value. STREAMLINED INNOVATION Speed time to market on new application and service launches by eliminating the need to duplicate profile management capabilities. By transforming customer identity data into a reusable, shared service, the cost of maintaining and protecting the data can be reduced, and the data can be used within the company to deliver a highly personalized customer experience, improving both customer satisfaction and loyalty. IN 2014, CUSTOMERS WERE FLOCKING TO PROVIDERS/BRANDS THAT DELIVER RELEVANT AND FRICTION-FREE DIGITAL+PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE. THE TREND IS ACCELERATING. -MARKETING EXECUTIVES, NETWORKING GROUP MARCH

9 IT S ALL ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE One of the key tenets of omnichannel is delivering a superior customer experience that enables a customer to move fluidly among channels. Federated identity management not only provides a more secure experience, it s one of the few security technologies that can actually improve customer experience rather than imposition it. Many enterprises have a multitude of business applications across different lines of business that exist in silos (whether functional or physical), as well as white label or partner applications that they want to provide access to. One aspect of identity management, federated single-sign on (SSO), gives the customer a single login experience to move fluidly through those applications. This approach also allows for rapid monetization of new technologies after a merger or acquisition. While it might be a significant amount of work on the back end to merge infrastructure, a quick win is using federation to link users accounts on the front end across the web channel or the mobile channel, for fluid access. THE USER EXPERIENCE INCLUDES AUTHENTICATION What began as simple SSO technology has grown rapidly over the past decade at a rate that continues to accelerate with mass consumer adoption of mobile and the API economy. We used to just be concerned with how a customer moved through the web experience, but we now have to extend that to a fluid experience across all channels (and channels yet to come), and what that means in terms of an authentication experience. Customers should be able to maintain states as they shift across different channels. Different users, whether customers, clients or partners, are entering your web portals through various channels. And today, it s not just about web access, but also API access, especially if you re talking about mobile devices and leveraging social identity or other third-party credentials. As the paradigm of password as authenticator becomes increasingly problematic, many alternative authentication methods have emerged (e.g., the mobile device as the authenticator). The current identity protocol that s discussed most often is Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), used for federated SSO. While that protocol will continue to be valid and valuable, there s an emerging need for a modern identity protocol stack that we think will address the next generation of access challenges as evidenced by the increased adoption of protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM). SAML is an open XML standard used for the authentication and authorization of data between an identity provider and service provider. SAML enables businesses to share identity information across domains. OAUTH 2.0 is the security layer for APIs, web-based APIs or REST APIs, which is a standardized way for how you can attach security tokens to make authentication or authorization decisions on those APIs. OPENID CONNECT is an emerging SSL protocol that leverages OAuth, which works effectively in browsers, as well as native and mobile applications. SCIM is a user management API that leverages OAuth as a security layer and supports managing, adding, updating and deleting user accounts within different administrative domains. 9

10 The idea of an open platform that allows for new and emerging identity standards and protocols has become paramount. The time of purpose-built identity silos is over. The next-generation identity platform delivers a layer unifying disparate identity architectures of legacy systems, and allows the enterprise to emerge into the omnichannel future. THE SOLUTION FOR SECURING IDENTITY IN THE OMNICHANNEL Ping Identity believes secure professional and personal identities underlie human progress in a connected world. Our purpose is to enable and protect identity, defend privacy and secure the Internet. The Ping identity Platform gives enterprise customers and employees one-click access to any application from any device. Over 2,000 companies, including 45 of the Fortune 100, rely on our award-winning products to make the digital world a better experience for hundreds of millions of people. Ping Identity is also ranked #56 of top 100 high-growth, privately held U.S. companies by Forbes magazine. For more information on how to secure identities in your enterprise omnichannel, please contact a sales specialist at For more information, visit ABOUT PING IDENTITY: Ping Identity leads a new era of digital enterprise freedom, ensuring seamless, secure access for every user to all applications across the hyper-connected, open digital enterprise. Protecting over one billion identities worldwide, more than half of the Fortune 100, including Boeing, Cisco, Disney, GE, Kraft Foods, TIAA-CREF and Walgreens trust Ping Identity to solve modern enterprise security challenges created by their use of cloud, mobile, APIs and IoT. Visit pingidentity.com. 10 # v003