Simeio
CIAM Solutions at Home and Abroad

CIAM Solutions at Home and Abroad

CIAM Solutions

Travel today looks very different from how it did pre-pandemic in many ways. You can skip the ticket desk or kiosk entirely at the airport if you’re flying light with a mobile boarding pass. Some hotels have “smart rooms” where guests can control their room experience from lighting to temperature by connecting a personal device. You no longer have to interact with hospitality staff at all if you don’t want to. This is thanks to the significant developments in CIAM solutions which the travel and hospitality industry has undergone.

The way customers experience travel services, as well as how those enterprises manage customer identities, has become a crucial consideration. CIAM is a critical component of this change, addressing challenges such as inconsistent user experiences and security while offering the potential for highly personalized customer interactions. Explore the role of CIAM solutions in the travel and hospitality sector, both at home and abroad, and how they are enabling the industry to keep up with changes.

Traditional CIAM Solutions in Travel and Hospitality

In the past, traditional CIAM in travel and hospitality often led to inconsistent user experiences. Travelers and vacationers frequently found themselves having to create separate accounts for every provider they used – airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and travel agencies, to name a few. This resulted in fragmented and siloed systems, each with their own identity systems, which, in turn, increased the attack surface and made it challenging to provide a seamless and secure experience for consumers.

Moreover, these disjointed systems made it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of customers’ preferences, behaviors, and expectations. Consequently, the lack of consumer insights hindered personalization efforts. Essentially, companies struggled to tailor their services and marketing to meet individual needs effectively. Businesses missed potential improvements to customer experience, resulting in unprofitable friction.

Achieving Both Customer Experience and Security

In today’s world, users expect a frictionless and secure experience when interacting with travel and hospitality services. The rise of technology-driven   and digitized experiences, such as self-service kiosks, mobile check-in, facial recognition used for airplane boarding, and contactless payments, has set the bar high. Customers lash out when they lose the convenience of these features. However, you must deliver convenience without compromising on personal data security.

Additionally, the travel and hospitality industry also faces unique challenges. These include the integration of business and leisure travel, the increasing importance of experiences over possessions, and a surge in research-savvy travelers. Additional issues include ongoing staffing shortages, supply chain challenges, and rising costs that make necessary infrastructure upgrades more challenging. In such an environment, striking the right balance between customer experience and security is crucial. Managed CIAM solutions are the best way to achieve these directives.

Implications of Leveraging Managed CIAM Solutions

Leveraging managed CIAM services can be a game-changer for the travel and hospitality industry. These solutions help companies keep up with industry trends, provide automation and expert oversight, and offer a wide range of benefits:

Keep up with Industry Trends: The travel and hospitality sector is known for its fast-paced changes. Managed CIAM solutions ensure that companies stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies. This helps them remain competitive and relevant to their consumers.

Automation and Expert Oversight: Managed CIAM services provide automation to engage travelers with frictionless digital experiences. These systems capture valuable consumer insights. These are then integrated with the tech stack to enhance services and tailor marketing campaigns effectively.

Empower Frontline Employees: In a time when the travel and hospitality industry faces staffing shortages, managed CIAM services empower frontline employees to provide superior customer service. This can be done by simplifying processes, making relevant customer data readily available, and automating routine tasks.

Protect Consumer Data: Securing consumer data is paramount. Managed CIAM services offer enhanced security measures to safeguard customer data, including personal and financial information.

Improved Customer Experiences: The ultimate goal of CIAM solutions is to provide a seamless and highly personalized customer experience. With a managed CIAM system in place, customers can easily book flights, manage reservations, and access loyalty programs using a single account, eliminating the need for multiple logins and enhancing convenience.

Better Security: Managed CIAM services also deliver better security, ensuring that customer loyalty accounts for airlines, hotels, and other providers remain protected from cyber threats.

Deeper Consumer Insights: By centralizing and analyzing customer data, businesses can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their customers. This deeper insight enables them to provide better, more personalized customer experiences.

Leverage CIAM in your Organization

The travel and hospitality industry evolves rapidly, driven by technological advancements and shifting customer expectations. As travel and leisure merge, personalized experiences become the norm. Furthermore, as technology plays a more significant role, CIAM solutions have a crucial role. With the right CIAM strategy in place, your travel and hospitality business can continue to thrive in a changing world.

Contact a Simeio identity advisor and learn what the ideal CIAM solution looks like for your enterprise.

How Your Customers Directly Benefit from Managed CIAM Services

How Your Customers Directly Benefit from Managed CIAM Services

Managed CIAM Services

CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) is the direct link between online enterprises and their patrons. From the time a customer registers a profile to their fifth recovery of forgotten credentials, the quality of your CIAM solution shapes perception of your business.  Managed CIAM services are a worthy investment for any customer-facing enterprise.

The complicated task of creation, implementation, and management of a CIAM solution frequently leads to flawed and unscalable systems. This lesson is often learned only after hundreds of thousands of dollars have been sunk into a subpar CIAM. By considering the tangible benefits, both immediate and long-term, of Managed CIAM Services, you can avoid costly fumbling and start enjoying the fruits of an expertly-tuned CIAM in the span of a few short months.

The Failings of Traditional CIAM 

Traditional CIAM structures, even as far back as paper-only records, have been defined by manual recordkeeping. These outmoded models cost workhours, cause inefficiencies, and neglect regulatory compliance. More than anything, the majority of CIAM solutions will only focus on either customer experience or security, satisfying one while neglecting the other.

To make the customer experience as frictionless as possible many practices forgo vital security safeguards in favor of stopgaps. Their advantage of ubiquity across multiple vendors and platforms makes them attractive for wide scale adoption. MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) was implemented as a quick and easy solution for cyberattacks but has since been proven ineffective. SMS or email OTP (One Time Password) are likewise vulnerable to phishing and fatigue.

Passwordless authentication and identity-proofing addresses this issue, but adoption has not yet reached the levels necessary for easy universal use. In the immediate term most strong security measures prove inconvenient to the average customer, and inconvenience is the bane of a positive customer experiences.

Another glaring flaw with unmanaged customer identity and access is lack of maintenance. System experts leave the company and programs grow dangerously obsolete. Even when a new system is implemented, much of the old data is in danger of being lost. An effective CIAM service provider ensures that while setting up a CIAM program, the focus is not just on migrating legacy databases but also scaling them as the enterprise develops and evolves.

How Managed CIAM Services Improve Efficiency and Security

Managed CIAM services remediate the failings of traditional CIAM program through automation and expert oversight. One of the most effective fixes is enabling self-service. Without self-service, customers must contact their provider every time they have an issue, taking up both their own time and the provider’s resources. A well-designed self-service apparatus, consistently cut back on client service desk calls.

On the security side, traditional privacy management uses manual and siloed authentication services prone to customer friction. Internal automated management solutions  strengthen security and boosting efficiency through delegation of management authority. This works especially well in organization with multiple offices, wherein a single and centralized identity fabric replaces the insular solutions of individual offices.

The KPIs of your managed CIAM service depend upon your industry, but all share the same easy-to-quantify metrics. A finance firm might just want to check the compliance box. A government agency could want to reduce support calls by a certain number. A retailer might focus on their conversion rate of browsing-to-paying customers. A managed CIAM service fulfills all three goals for all three businesses at the same time.

Managed CIAM services really shine with scalability and monitoring. Maintaining, futureproofing, addressing security patches, and generally keeping up with evolving needs is a constant endeavor. The challenges of operation are more daunting than implementation, hence why so many companies rely on Simeio’s expert curation.

How the Challenges of Managed CIAM Services are Overcome

This is not to say that managed CIAM service is not without challenges, but the best providers have become experts in solving them. A trap many users fall into is the siren song of loyalty programs, incentivizing customers to create one account after another. It is much better to use a ubiquitous SSO account, where only one login is needed to access features.

Many organizations use SSO to centralize their logins, allowing users of their services to access their music, game library, and all other records from a single pane. SSO cuts down on fraud protection steps while paradoxically increasing security (fewer credentials means a smaller attack surface).

Another challenge is compromising on features during the selection of managed CIAM services vendors. Fortunately, excellent CIAM offerings of OktaPing, and Forgerock can be yours in a single package. The key is in combining these feature that sets it into a single highly customizable platform optimized for your unique needs and KPIs.

An identity orchestration platform comes bundled with CIAM, taking on helpdesk in such a way that protects privacy while ensuring permissions are given to those who need to have it, easy to grant and track. Orchestration allows for quick and easy migration of legacy data, providing relief on a major pain point endemic to managed CIAM services.

If you want to assess your need for end to end CIAM services, Simeio employs a dedicated staff of experts to fulfill your unique requirements instead of straightjacketing your enterprise with a one-size-fits-all model. Customizations including data collection and storage, application onboarding, and company branding are just a few reasons to start building your Simeio services package.

Is your Digital Transformation Strategy Backed with a Reliable CIAM Programme?

Is your Digital Transformation Strategy Backed with a Reliable CIAM Programme?

Support your Digital Transformation with Solid CIAM

Improved customer trust and loyalty are two major outcomes of digital transformation programmes. Trust has often been the number one concern for most customers when sharing their personal data. There is an increased awareness among customers about how identities can be misused, accessed without authorisation, and misuse of their personal information without their consent. How organisations manage their customers’ digital identities is a critical part of their overall trust in their brand. As a customer base grows, so does the attack surface, which often the result of upgrades, updates and completed in haste due to the lack of a proper Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) programme.

Protect Customer Identities to Win their Trust and Loyalty

Simeio is proud to be a UK Finance Associate Member supporting digital identity. We provide a secure way to access services, confirm identity, manage data, control access, and maintain user privacy.

In a recent UK Finance webinar co-presented by Simeio and Ping Identity, it was found that 53% of organisations that attended, view that the digital experience for their customers is merely functional – not scalable nor providing a memorable digital experience, entirely matured indicating existence of potential gaps. The same survey found that 44% organisations said their customers have a common set of main credentials but require additional credentials for special apps. This may be a tedious process for customers!

To view the UK Finance webinar “Transforming Digital Customer Engagement with Identity” with Simeio and Ping Identity, please download the on-demand recording video here.

One of the success parameters of digital transformation should be simplifying the processes of customer identity management and increased customer trust by reducing friction through an improved digital user experience. This can only be achieved with a well planned and executed CIAM program.

Why CIAM?  

CIAM plays a critical role in in Knowing Your Customer (KYC) programme, where applications are expected to serve up services to authorised customers and have the control on providing and maintaining their information.  CIAM benefits customers and drives conversions. The business also benefits, as CIAM provides deep customer insights. In addition, developers can speed the app development by focusing on the functionality of the application and not so much on the user management and security layer.

CIAM Benefits for User Groups

Customers – Better UX & Security
Businesses – Achieve Deeper Customer Insights
App Developers – Faster Application Development

A few key measurements quantify the advantages of Customer Identity Access Management. These include the average time it takes to convert prospects into first-time consumers of your financial products. Additional indicators of success include a reduction in customer churn, lowering the cost of customer acquisition, or reducing risk and fraudulent activity. However, creating a single view of the user, enabling a seamless customer experience, and meeting regulatory compliance is no easy task for any organisation. This requires highly integrated and efficient technologies, processes, and personnel.

In the above-mentioned webinar, 50% who attended felt their organisation’s digital transformation resulted in lot of processes that they could get more efficient at.

Implementing Effective CIAM

An effective way to eliminate this complexity and add value is partnering with an identity services provider with a cutting edge CIAM technology. Simeio offers a CIAM service powered by Ping Identity that combines years of engineering effort with real-world know how.

At Simeio we understand the established nature of your Open Banking / PSD2 journey is well. But what is your strategy to scale? We are here to help you to not only thrill your customers but nurture a long- term relationship to build your brand equity. We integrate our Open Banking platforms with industry leading technical solutions from Ping Identity, to ensure that the security, reliability, performance, and responsiveness are all top of class for your deployment. Check out our CIAM offerings on Open Banking platforms.

Simeio offers assessment sessions to review organisations’ identity maturity level. This would start by considering user communities, then the applications current and planned for those communities and assessing the readiness of an organisation’s digital processes to support their go-to-market plans.

Simeio is a UK Finance Associate Member supporting digital identity in financial services and other industries.