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Enhancing and securing the retail reward program

Sven Dummer, product marketing, Akamai Technologies, offers up insight on how brands and retailers can boost and secure reward programs with customer identity access management technology.

Photo by iStock.com

July 12, 2019

By Sven Dummer, product marketing, Akamai Technologies

The days of customer loyalty punch cards are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Shoppers rack up points by providing an email address or scanning the brand's app at checkout in exchange for free cups of coffee or discounted shoes. But many brands continue to stick to more antiquated methods of rewarding their most loyal customers, and brands in both scenarios are at risk of losing customers. In today's world of fierce price competition, consumers are less likely to be attracted by discount rewards unless brands take the necessary steps to personalize their loyalty programs.

According to Forrester, only 55 percent of brands personalize their customer loyalty programs. Typical barriers are the lack of unified customer profile data and the inability to recognize customers across channels, and that companies are not equipped to properly use the data they collect. What's more, it's difficult for brands to offer personalized rewards programs while securing customers' personal data in compliance with increasingly complex privacy protection regulations that vary across regions.

Personalization must be fit for digital natives

Still, digital native consumers expect brands to maximize personalization and facilitate direct brand-to-consumer communication (and vice versa) — which in return requires personal data.

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is the discipline of collecting and managing personal customer data in a way that ensures regulatory compliance and security while allowing the business to utilize that data within their marketing automation and content management systems to create personalized customer experiences. For loyalty marketers, who depend on reliable data, the quality and capabilities of their CIAM implementation can make or break a successful rewards program. Identity data is the fuel for any form of personalization.

On a very basic level, CIAM comprises account registration and login, including single sign-on across multiple applications and social login, which allows customers to use their existing social media accounts instead of creating an entirely new account.

But modern CIAM solutions go far beyond that and also manage customer preferences and consent settings. They reduce customer service costs and account abandonment rates by providing self-service options to recover lost passwords or forgotten usernames. They centrally store the customer data, provide the security mechanisms needed to protect it, and integrate with monitoring solutions to detect and flag suspicious events. Most importantly, they can provide the customer data to other systems — be it a CRM, a helpdesk system or an in-store point of service solution.

The implementation of a CIAM solution enables companies to build unified, data-rich customer profiles and to recognize customers across channels. It allows customers to engage with the brand from anywhere, on any device and at any time.

The ability to track, store and remember customer data from the beginning of their relationship with a company allows brands promote only those services and products that make sense to the individual, based on their personal preferences and history.

Ubiquitous security

Consumer data protection regulations vary across regions, states and countries. As more nations look toward models like GDPR to further enhance privacy and data security, it's critical that brands adopt security systems that provide consistent and streamlined customer experience across borders, while staying compliant with local privacy laws.

GDPR and other regulations require businesses to collect explicit consent from users before using their data and to provide customers full visibility into how their data is used, with the option to revoke consent or have their data deleted entirely. This is a non-trivial, almost impossible task for many in-house identity management systems. A dedicated CIAM solution can help, for example by allowing shoppers to access, download and modify their data in a self-service fashion while the system keeps and audit-ready log of all changes to the data record.

Identity data is pivotal to personalized loyalty marketing, and marketers need to look critically at the efficiency of their identity management. Doing so will not only allow companies to create better customer experiences and ensure long-term loyalty, but will also help them maintain global compliance and a competitive edge.