Keep your customer secure but don't forget yourself !

The most obvious thing you would ever say to anyone is that you represent yourself. It’s a weird thing to say, except when you are in court. But on the web, who represents you? You? It would be your digital identity which is a set of personal attributes you are sure can be made public. Like your name and location.

But you already know this because you extract this information from your customers. But how do you know that the identity information provided by your customer is not phony? There is a lot of talk about customer privacy, security and all that. But what about the security of a business on the web? You can’t be spending your bucks doing analytics on customer profile information that is phony and useless. Obviously, your entire database is not likely to be phony; there are still some good souls left on this planet. But you can avoid this using proper authentication mechanisms which might cost you a little but keep you immune from phony customers.

But for this you would have to use a Customer Identity and Access Management (cIAM) platform that provides mobile integration. Well, the rise of the smartphone has meant that a majority of your customers use their smartphones to login to your website. They would either see the mobile compatible version of your website or use your app, if you have built one. If haven’t built one already, then you are running behind the world. It is estimated there are 1.6 million apps on the Google Play Store, about 1.5 million on the Apple Store and close to another million on stores run for other mobile platforms like Windows Phone and Blackberry. And this number is only rising. And tag this with smartphone market growth numbers. Global smartphone sales increased by 15.5 per cent in Q1 2015 over the corresponding period of last year.

Again, this means that the smartphone should be a critical part of your overall strategy and cIAM being central to your marketing strategy, your platform should ensure it is compatible and provides integration with mobile platforms. Returning to the part about phony customers, the smartphone or the mobile phone again plays a vital role. More and more businesses, especially banks and smartphone based web businesses, are utilizing the smartphone to ascertain the credentials of their customers through their phone numbers. The One Time Password mechanism which sends a unique code to the customer’s mobile phone was introduced as a security mechanism so as not to let your customers be subjected to identity theft. Only the customers entering the OTP will be authenticated which means a person wanting to commit identity theft will have to breach another firewall. But at the same time, this also ensures all of your customers are unique considering the fact that each mobile number is unique and already verified by the service provider. cIAM platforms are also allowing for this mechanism to be added to the list of features. There is also talk about bio-metric verification for online customers but that is still a subject of controversy and best left for another day.