The business world as we know it is rapidly changing and one of the fundamental drivers is digital transformation( https://www.i-scoop.eu/digital-transformation/). The online interactions between people, business, devices, data, and services are the backbone of the digital economy. This means a business need to have an interconnected view of people, organizations, machines, devices and the internet of things (IoT) at all times to understand who your consumers are and what they want. Consumer digital identity is the one that can address this and is an important factor in today’s digital economy for all enterprises.

What is Consumer digital Identity?

Gone are the days when consumers would come seeking for business solutions. In the current age, a business has to seek the consumers. There is a strong realization that digital identity is the front door for all business.

Enterprises currently have their consumers coming in as anonymous or they have pre-established identities that are distributed across various old and new systems. Know your customer (KYC) has been the biggest challenge for enterprises to solve. Addressing other business problems and efficiency around customer experience, lead generation, building awareness of their products, consumer recommendations, up-selling or reselling, billing, loyalty programs, retention, license management has snowballed this challenge.

64 percent of enterprises already indicate that Security, AI, and analytics as the top three efforts on their list of digital transformation technologies they are most interested in. With the advances in the digital Identity, mechanisms offer the promise of greater efficiency, security, and trust in a wide variety of settings.

Opportunities with Consumer digital Identity

1. Consumer Security and Fraud management.
Data breach is a common problem for a business these days. Hence security is crucial in protecting the consumers as well as their business assets. Identity and access management along with identity governance, audit and compliance allow to monitor and manage who has access to what, when and why. This helps a business to be aware who is coming through their front door so their consumers can access the products and services. This also helps to monitor and manage unwanted solicitors who want to create fraud or damage to the business.

2. Consumer Trust and engagement.
Consumers have a small attention span to engage with a business or a brand. This would mean that the process of engagement should be light and frictionless. At the same time, consumers should feel comfortable to trust the brand or business to share who they are so they can establish an identity.
Establishing trust by engaging customers across multiple channels (phone, web, social media, in-store) with personalized offerings based on real-time insights has to be a priority in order to expand and building a strong customer base.

3. Consumer Brand awareness and lead generation.
Importance of brand awareness is an important task for marketing team in any business. Marketing has a need to identify their consumers and tailor their campaign messages so that there is a better return on investment for their marketing dollars spent.
By leveraging the identity data of a consumer helps marketing to segment, tailor and personalize their campaigns and efficiency around lead generation activities

4. Consumer Retention and loyalty.
Customer loyalty is an intangible but extremely valuable business asset that helps to up-sell and/or resell product and services. The ability to measure and model customer loyalty is an essential element to building customer relationships and expanding the market size. The ability to retain customers is a factor that is important to increase your recurring revenue. Understanding the behavioral and contextual insights of the individual customer through their identity data will allow to influence, advocate and expand the loyalty and retention base for any business.

5. 360 Degree view of your consumers.
Consumer data in a typical enterprise resides in multiple systems depending on the customer journey that an individual takes with various products and services through multiple channels ( i.e cross-device, online, in-store and more). Aggregating data of the consumer from various systems and channels into a single unified view based on an individual’s identity becomes a very valuable asset for any business.

Business can then leverage this 360-degree view and the data to make intelligent business decisions around personalization, discounts, recommendation, alerts, notifications, deliver value-added services and more.

Current Technology and Business Trends in Consumer Digital Identity.

1. Identity and Access Management (IAM) Security Standards.
Standard protocols like SCIM, SAML, OAUTH2, OpenID Connect, UMA, REST make it easy for the business to adopt digital Identity for their consumers. The approach to security standards strengthens interoperability both in a SaaS, on-premise or hybrid IAM environments across users, web, phones, social, devices, desktops, and IoT.

2. Self-service and data-driven consumer journey is the new norm.
Easy to use interfaces in IAM that allow consumer self-service interactions to not only establish their digital identity with a business but also allow to consumers to carry their existing digital identity established with a social provider. This experience should be frictionless.

Consumers want their experiences tailored to their needs and wants. A business will have to take a data-driven customer experience by design approach to collect, analyze and provide a very personalized journey at every touchpoint to their consumers. Self-service UX and Data Analytics along with Identity Governance should be an integral part of IAM.

3. Privacy and Data Protection is in the forefront for consumer trust.
Security and privacy by design is the foundation for data privacy. IAM Technology should be able to help a business to maintain their consumers and prospect data secure at all times including the loss, theft or corruption of data. With General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going live in Europe and more GDPR like regulation to come into effect in the US, there is more need for Privacy and Data Protection to be in the forefront for establishing trust with consumers.

4. Devops and Microservice are the new standards for deployment.
A business now operate in a complex model where the consumers identity and access is expanding across users (ex. Employees, Contractors, Partners. Members), devices (ex. Enterprise computers, enterprise devices, public computers, IoT devices, phones) and apps (ex. SaaS apps, Public cloud apps, partner apps, private cloud apps, on-prem apps).

This would mean that the identity and access management solutions should handle DevOps and Microservice are the new standards for deployment for IAM.

5. Disruption and innovation through SaaS, AI/ML, Blockchain, Chabot, Big Data, is the new normal.
With customer data playing the forefront of all innovation, there is a lot of focus on the technology trend like Blockchain to decentralize the consumer identity information that can help business to scale globally.

Use of AI/ML can power insights from a consumer’s history, preferences, context, and behaviors to deliver more targeted offers and better the outcomes that can increase sales and the customer experiences.

The automated tasks like customer on-boarding, post-sale services, and support can be managed by Chatbots which helps to increase the efficiency, scale, and satisfaction for consumers.