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Identity-first for a more secure, seamless digital user experience

Article by Ben Goodman, SVP and GM, Okta Asia Pacific & Japan

The pandemic has accelerated the shift towards online modes of customer engagement for many businesses. Today, it’s fair to say that if you don’t have a reliable online business, you don’t have a business at all.

The pandemic has also intensified competition among companies, making technology adoption an important differentiator to survive and thrive. In the world of digital engagement, to thrive you must first have a good understanding of your customers and target audience, so digital identity becomes an enabler to scaling quickly and providing a stellar customer experience.

Building a future-ready, identity-first enterprise

A future-ready, viable business with a digital presence ought to start with a frictionless, highly available, and secure customer identity cloud. From a business development perspective, an advanced customer identity cloud also gives companies the all-important single view of their customers.

The customer identity cloud sits at the intersection of security, customer experience, and analytics. Providing an easy, frictionless way for users to onboard and login is critical for driving conversions and building customer loyalty.

The customer identity cloud can help organizations leverage their knowledge of the customer to build more relevant, higher-converting digital experiences. The right customer identity cloud solution enables a complete, 360-degree view of customer profiles and preferences by consolidating and centralizing user data across various sources including both internal and third-party systems. This unified view provides a better understanding of who your customers are and what they want so that you can tailor your outreach and campaigns for a more effective marketing strategy.

digital identity

Ben Goodman, SVP and GM, Okta Asia Pacific & Japan

Successful digital identity transformations in APAC

APAC enterprises that have successfully leveraged customer identity clouds include NTUC Enterprise and AIA.

With customers spread across 10 social enterprises under the group, NTUC Enterprise customers had separate accounts for each of the social enterprise’s services, and these silos detracted from the UX and prevented the team from forming a single, holistic view of their customers.

In order to perform a simple task like updating their address, customers had to update it through multiple contact points with various social enterprises. They also lacked a way to identify high-value customers from across the group’s portfolio of businesses.

As such, NTUC Enterprise needed an identity solution that would migrate all of this scattered data into a single profile for each customer, all while obeying Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).

Okta’s Auth0 Customer Identity Cloud team then worked with NTUC Enterprise’s NE Digital team to migrate the digital identities of 1.2 million FairPrice online grocery customers from its legacy system to Auth0 over a period of just two months.

NTUC Enterprise was also able to securely manage the digital identities of its workforce through Auth0’s Private Cloud, which ensured compliance with Singapore’s data privacy regulations. Customer service officers are also using Auth0’s dedicated admin portal to have a richer overview of NTUC Enterprise customers, thereby enabling faster, more seamless services.

Leading insurer AIA was another organization that had entrusted Okta to transform digital identity for its employees and customers.

AIA had embarked on its digital transformation from a 100% on-premise to a hybrid and multi-cloud architecture, and a major challenge emerged in ensuring frictionless experiences while enabling “bank-level security” for its 20,000+ workers across Asia.

Okta Identity Cloud’s Zero Trust, a vendor-neutral and cloud-native solution that could enable next-generation, multi-factor authentication emerged as the front-runner when AIA was looking for solutions to replace its legacy system.

With its Pan-Asian workforce Okta-ready, AIA now has sights on customer identity access management (CIAM) with Okta Customer Identity.

The insurer is looking to deploy CIAM for its flagship insurance and wellness program, AIA Vitality, for which it foresees one million monthly active users signing on with Okta across the Asia-Pacific. Apart from this, AIA’s other major initiative is reconciling Zero Trust with frictionless sign-on, and Okta’s passwordless authentication solution FastPass promises to be a key tool.

With the right identity technology and advice, all enterprises can enjoy the same benefits of a secure and seamless user experience for their employees and end-users.

The views in the article is that of the author and may not represent the views of Tech Wire Asia.