Technological adoptions in Ecommerce Industry

This year has been amazing for every business, whether it is Manufacturing, Retail, IT etc. Compared to previous years many new businesses have opened up, some are unique of it’s kind. With technological evolution, expansion of ideas and creation of new business took place.

Taking example of 3D Printing Technology, its adoption as a business started  last year and is influencing every field of business and production. Some business are purely serving the purpose of 3D Printing and are running well.

Some Technological changes can be seen and acknowledged by people but some changes and advancements are in backend or to the side which people are not exposed to like Process Control Machines, replacing of analogue devices with digital ones which are much more accurate and easy to maintain etc.

Even in film making, realistic IMax technology has revolutionized to such an extent that no one can spot a big difference between  a real life scene and an digitally generated scene. Animated movies are now produced using IMax technology and upon viewing them in 3D, it looks like it’s happening in real, in front of eyes.

Ecommerce is one of the many industries that has been affected by Technological change. If we talk about changes, in front end, Various UI/UX implementations have been done and they look beautiful.

Customer Identity Platform  is one such technology which businesses have opted. It is a change seen by visitors as well as the admin of the website.

What customer Identity Platform does is that, it manages user registrations on a website.

Users can login or sign-in into a website by filling up a simple form or use their social network for loggin in.

Logging in via social is pretty convenient for users as they do not have to remember multiple passwords. A cIAM platform also manages this social login data and integrates with over all registration data seamlessly.

On the developer's side, the data is managed securely hence providing an ease to developers and business owner.

Hence this technological adoption of a Identity management platform is influencing and easing lives and profiting both ends.ecomme

Read More →

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.

Read More →

How the Workforce of 2020 is like the Customers of today!

What is the simplest way to get customers and then more customers? Call them (or rather notify them) and give them what they want at the best prices. Something like Santa Claus does for Christmas. But even that isn’t easy.

What is the mantra of business on the Web? Let customers buy a product at a cheaper price while making the process easier and more enjoyable than usually is. Pretty simple, eh? The customer isn’t demanding by nature, he or she is moulded to be such by the Web environment.



In fact, customers can be equated to employees today. Interestingly, findings of a research of the workforce by Oxford Economics and SAP mirror the persona of customers. According to the research, the workforce of 2020 will be increasingly flexible, diverse and mobile. Exactly how customers are already. Customers too are flexible, shop on their phones and come from different backgrounds.

HR departments at enterprises often lacks insights into employees to be strategic in the sense that they don’t know what their employees truly want and expect from them. Same goes for businesses too. Many companies are found wanting in terms of insight into true requirements of customers which is so vital to serve them. The Oxford Economics and SAP research also points out, “Millennials need to be managed differently in terms of feedback and development.” The same applies to millennial customers too. Businesses need to segment them and manage them differently.

There are two points here that businesses need to keenly follow: One, customers are increasingly becoming mobile and flexible meaning they are not going to use just one computer terminal or one account to interact with your business but will most likely use multiple devices from multiple locations through different accounts each represented by a different dataset. As a business, your job is to unify these datasets to provide a unified customer profile most probably through the use of Web Single Sign-On. Single Sign-On is a key tool in Customer Identity and Access Management that helps users access multiple web properties after logging in just once. Unfortunately, Single Sign-On is publicized as a tool for customers to beat password fatigue. Of course, it is a brilliant solution to password fatigue but it has many other critical benefits foremost among which is the ability to help create a unified view of the customer and identify him or her as a single person. A unified view helps create this single picture of the customer and more importantly, helps the customer pick from he or she left off irrespective of the device or channel being used to interact or transact with the business.

Second, brands must establish trust relationships with customers also termed brand relationships and this stems directly from the first because brands can no longer use a generic relationship strategy for all segments of customers. Millennials employees need to be managed differently and so do millennial customers. And there is no better time to focus on this than 2016 because it is predicted to be the year of the millennial customers. Winning over the millennial customer is not easy by any means but it is not the most difficult task either if you have the right strategy.

Read More →

Mobile is big but not so big for marketers yet

It will yet take some more time for the day when you don’t have to present usernames and passwords or enter account numbers but your device just knows it’s you without the need for any manual interaction. No fingerprints, no passkeys, no retina scans, maybe some form of a DNA recognition tech. Too far-fetched? Right. Nothing like that is happening anytime soon, so we just have to stick with what we have right now.

And that best authentication system we have right now is the password coupled with the smartphone. Passwords have been the best bets at identity management and their eventual authentication and with mobile bringing a mini revolution, it appears we’re insured for some time. Mobile has not just become our identity, but it is also a permanent channel between businesses and customers. Full-fledged engagement and loyalty campaigns would have been impossible without mobile devices. But, wait. Is that all?

Well, despite mobile being such a proven force, digital marketers are still ignoring it. In a very recent report, research agency Forrester has said that businesses must fully integrate mobile technologies into their marketing strategies this year, giving the obvious implication that businesses haven’t actually been able to do so until now.

Forrester said that while marketers do fully realize the potential that mobile holds for their business, curiously, they don’t know how to use it effectively. “Mobile is the most disruptive change in consumer behavior in years. Marketers know this and they keep saying mobile is strategic. However, reality is that they struggle measuring ROI of mobile because they do not clearly articulate how mobile can serve their marketing objectives and because they don’t measure the right metrics,” Thomas Husson, vice president and principal analyst of marketing and strategy at Forrester Research, explained in the report.

That seems conclusive but seems to coherence. Especially because the differentiation between Web applications and mobile applications is rapidly fading away. But importantly, the differentiation tends to be invisible from the customer’s perspective only. If actively using mobile as part of the marketing strategy, businesses still have to do quite a bit of back-end work (unless they are using an efficient Customer Identity Management tool) to make sure that Web and mobile don’t bring data silos to the table. This involves a lot of integration work, also called unification of the customer profiles, considered extremely hard by organization so much so that about 30% businesses think this is a huge barrier to providing a better Customer Experience (CX), as per an Adobe-Econsultancy study.

As Forrester put it, maybe a lot of companies don’t understand how mobile serves their purpose, maybe in some cases it doesn’t, but in Gartner terminology, mobile is a key player of the Nexus of Forces which is the basis of the complete Digital Marketing strategy, the other three being cloud, information and social. You leave one of them out of your strategy and you are missing out on huge revenues. Most companies now tend to leave a hole in the jigsaw because they just didn’t figure out that one piece.  

Read More →