The Role of Digital Identity in Business-Customer Relationship

Dealing with any business online have you ever wondered where this relationship would go? We all do. Even the modern-day enterprises possessing digital presence are quite familiar with the importance of a business-customer relationship. And with this relationship, there comes a series of challenges to retain healthy relation. The first step towards achieving a long-term business-customer relationship is to question.

How do you ensure that your customers are content with your services, and they have a secure and seamless experience to continue using your product and services? Do they feel confident enough in letting you handle their data? How are you going to manage a customer journey from frictionless onboarding till customer support? How will you personalise customer experience without compromising security?

These are a few essential questions that play a crucial role in enhancing customer experience and building an ongoing healthy relationship. All these questions point towards one thing, i.e. the importance of digital identities for customer retention. Let’s dive deeper into the role of digital ID in customer experience life-cycle and business-customer relationship.

First and the foremost ‘User Experience.’

User experience has a direct link to business success and customer retention. Therefore, providing a service that is better than the current one is a must. Always remember that your customers have multiple options to choose and if their experience is not up to the mark then they’ll surely switch to some other business. A report states that 79% of the users leave in between onboarding process due to bad experience.

Exceptional customer experience is no longer a plus point; it’s a necessity for businesses, more like a critical differentiator between an organisation and its competitors. Customer and identity access management (CIAM) is the primary factor for excellent customer experience and relationships. For any business getting everything right in the customer journey is the ultimate goal for it involves various stages and interactions. 

The best customer and identity access management solutions – Digital Identity Verification solutions – enable the businesses to know who their customers are while ensuring the streamlined process, security, scalability, magnificent user experience and regulatory compliance. 

Data Security is directly proportional to customer experience

Living in the digital era, securing digital identity is a significant concern of customers. With data breaches gaining publicity, the brand image and business reputation are at stake. Both of these points are necessary to retain customers. The stats show a 33.3% increase in data breaches in 2019 as compared to 2018. And this trend is even expected to grow more in 2020.

The business-customer relationship is all about striking the right balance between security and customer experience. Therefore, digital identity is as important as the ability to verify digital identities because the efficient ID verification is essential to curb online frauds including identity theft, financial scams, and money laundering while complying with KYC and AML regulations.

Stages of Customer Identity Life Cycle and Identity Verification

Customers are the backbone of any organisation, and if you think your work is done by onboarding them, then you are mistaken; the real struggle starts afterwards. Customer digital identity journey is a combination of different stages, and each step raises equally essential questions and holds a significant value. The common point among all these stages is ‘Knowing the customer’s identity’.

Traditionally, identity verification was only considered during customer onboarding but now moving forward as the business operations have transformed digitally, the demand for identity lifecycle has spiked. Presently, digital identity verification feeds into both security and customer experience throughout the customer journey. Shufti’s KYC verification solutions efficiently cover all the stages of customer identity lifecycle and facilitate organisations in building sustained business-customer relationships.

1. Customer Onboarding

“What processes are businesses going to follow to bring customers online?” is the most important question that customers ponder upon. Modern-day customers expect frictionless onboarding process and exceptional customer experience. Manual form fillings and registration are out of date, time-consuming and quite cumbersome. 

Shufti’s AI-powered Identity solution is more convenient and secure, focusing on two elements, i.e. Government-issued ID document and a face of a customer that are unique for every individual. Moreover, the OCR technology eliminates the need for manually form filling; hence, empowering customers to enjoy seamless onboarding within seconds. 

2. Customer Verification

“Are your customers who they say they are?” is crucial for businesses to confirm the identity of their customers to comply with KYC regulations and avoid any unfavourable circumstances in future. With online document verification, security can be achieved within seconds. 

Shufti’s intelligent verification solution compares the ID document of the customer with their live selfie in real-time. This solution ensures that the customers are who they are claiming to be. With the video proof of the entire verification process, the business can have evidence to avoid any KYC violation. Also, this verification lays a foundation of customer’s real identity throughout their identity lifecycle.

3. Customer Authentication

Once you have onboarded a customer, how will you ensure that every time only the authorised person is accessing your product or service, not some imposter? Simple login and passwords are not reliable, and con-artists can easily hack them. Face verification can authenticate the customers before allowing them access. It’s as easy as taking a selfie and ensures an exceptional level of security.

The liveness detection and 3D-depth analysis feature ensures that the authorised user is remotely present at the time of authentication. Henceforth, it curbs any type of facial spoof attacks. Also, there’s no need to rely on higher-friction solutions as call verification or KBA; just upload a quick selfie, and it’s done.

4. Account Deactivation

Your customers aren’t going to stay with you forever. Some are going to de-register within a month while some may take years. So, what’s going to happen to their data? Will it be immediately deleted or stay forever? Shufti’s is GDPR compliant identity verification solution and hence, provides the customer with their right to demand the deletion of data. This way, a customer unsubscribes the service in good terms without worrying about the privacy of their data.

Summing up, a seamless identity verification solution throughout the customer journey facilitates businesses in establishing a healthy customer relationship. Even when the customer opts to unsubscribe, it ends on a good note.