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How to Unwrap Digital Identity for a Happy Holiday Season in Retail

For many of us, the holiday season can be both a joyous and stressful experience. Delivering delightful experiences to our families, friends, and customers is inextricably linked with our ability to manage our time and our growing to-do list. 

Retailers operating in today’s hyper-competitive market are facing similar challenges. Tightening margins, supply chain fragility, labor shortages, and changing customer expectations have made this all the more challenging since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Checking off to-do list items one item at a time is no longer sustainable. But what if you could unwrap digital identity to change this paradigm while making this a holiday season to remember?
 

Uplevel Customer Experience (CX) to Grow Omnichannel Revenue 

A recent survey from McKinsey research found that 75% of consumers explored new shopping behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report also shows that personalizing customer experiences can increase online retail revenue by 15%. This comes as no surprise. The concepts of omnichannel personalization and the so-called ‘Amazon experience’ have raised customer expectations. 

Here’s how unwrapping digital identity can help you grow your omnichannel revenue:

  • Turn unknown visitors into known customers: Leverage rich information on your customers’ interaction with your brand to personalize and target messaging at the right stage of their shopping journey in order to minimize risk of shopping cart abandonment. Give customers the choice of authenticating via social identity providers, such as Facebook or Google, with one click.
  • Build a single view of customer identity: Integrate multiple identity stores across the end-to-end customer journey at pace to build a real-time view of needs, shopping habits, and preferences. Break down identity silos across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid IT deployments to deliver secure and seamless experiences across online/offline buying settings, loyalty programs, and fulfillment journeys to maximize customer lifetime value.
  • Deploy new mobile features rapidly and securely: Simplify and accelerate the deployment of new features across your mobile application ecosystem to deliver seamless on-brand experiences to your customers. Reduce security risks by integrating context-driven authentication and authorization across mobile customer journeys to strengthen brand loyalty. 

Strengthen Security to Build Loyalty  

The 2021 ForgeRock Consumer Identity Breach Report found that 16% of all breaches occur in the retail industry. Establishing, sustaining, and nurturing customer relationships and trust are contingent on securing customer data and privacy. 

Here’s how unwrapping digital identity can help you build customer loyalty: 

  • Enforce Zero Trust security: Leverage intelligent, contextual, and continuous security to connect and protect your employees, consumers, devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) at scale. Reduce the risk of unauthorized access across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid IT environments and protect your application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservices.
  • Implement context-driven authentication: Utilize low-code/no-code interfaces to orchestrate adaptive authentication and authorization journeys, helping your developers maximize feature and roadmap agility. Accelerate passwordless authentication to protect customers while reducing unnecessary friction and abandonment.
  • Ensure product and service availability: Prevent coordinated botnet attacks during and between seasonal peaks to ensure that your e-commerce platforms meet performance expectations while your customers are able to secure purchases in a way that meets their expectations. 

Turbocharge Scalability to Increase ROI

Recent U.S. retail market data shows that over 53% of consumers were anticipating product shortages during the Black Friday season, with a further 42% expecting products to be more expensive. Global supply-chain and labor problems have increased the cost of doing business in the near term. As a result, competition within and across retail segments is fiercer than ever before. 

Here’s how unwrapping digital identity can help scale and increase ROI on your digital investments:

  • Transition away from legacy: Reduce the business costs and disruptions associated with your cloud transformation and customer identity and access management (CIAM) modernization by managing legacy transition at your own pace. Bridge modern and legacy applications to enable rapid scalability across all digital channels.   
  • Deliver cloud availability and performance: Eliminate “noisy and nosy neighbor” problems across cloud deployments with modern CIAM capabilities that offer full-tenant isolation to scale high-availability across all your cloud deployments, preventing downtime and revenue loss during seasonal peak traffic periods. 
  • Enable omnichannel and hybrid retail: Streamline and secure your customer journeys across online (web, mobile) and offline (in-store, support call center) channels to scale hyper-personalization and brand re-targeting at pace. 

Deliver Your Amazon-Like Experience 

Unwrapping digital identity can help you deliver your very own Amazon-like experience to drive your omnichannel revenue, strengthen your customer brand loyalty, and maximize ROI on your digital investments.  

Find out how ForgeRock Identity Platform, recognized by Gartner as an industry leader, can help you develop a sustainable approach to managing your rapidly growing to-do list. Download your retail eBook today, and make this holiday season memorable, profitable, and secure.  

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Forgerock Blog authored by Adam Preis. Read the original post at: https://www.forgerock.com/blog/how-unwrap-digital-identity-happy-holiday-season-retail