Ever been on a website, ready to check out, only to encounter multiple fields to fill at once? Did the process frustrate you and make you close the page without completing your transaction? Such experiences and the resulting loss of customers could be happening to your business. That’s why you need better consumer identity and access management (CIAM).

Unlike traditional identity and access management (IAM), CIAM enables unknown users to self-register so that their identities are known by your organization. For CIAM to work well, consumers need to feel encouraged and secure in providing their information from the outset. This atmosphere is why a modular approach to CIAM makes sense for you to adopt. Let’s take a look at four building blocks, starting with Capture, followed by Engage, Manage and Admin. With them, your organization gets a manageable, repeatable mechanism to work with the consumer identities you need. In each part of the upcoming blog series, we’ll focus on one of those building blocks.

What Capture Means in CIAM Strategy

Consumers expect a frictionless form coupled with privacy. You want to provide those elements while obtaining their personally identifiable information (PII) and consent during their initial contact. The Capture building block allows you to achieve all these goals.

During the Capture sequence of your CIAM strategy, you establish and gain user trust as you collect their basic attributes in your first external, consumer-facing interaction. Often, this item is a form template you host in relation to your use case. You offer easy initial signup so that consumers feel comfortable submitting more PII and starting a workflow experience with you. To achieve this goal, begin by creating a CIAM registration form that sets up a strong relationship with your consumers.

How Capture Works

You should ask the following questions regarding your registration form in the CIAM Capture building block:

• What use case are you supporting? Is the customer purchasing products or signing up for events?
• What’s the look and feel you want? What sort of design and branding works best for your users?
• Should onboarding be the same for laptop, tablet and mobile users?
• What’s the registration experience? How can you have as little friction as possible for users during the process?
• What attributes are you looking for? What information is essential for your users’ journey?

For the latter questions, you want to collect the least amount of data needed; often only a first and last name and email address. By using CIAM to give your users the convenience of this passwordless authentication, you inspire them to stay active with your website rather than abandon the setup due to a lengthy registration process. They appreciate how simple it is to sign up with minimal data requirements at first.

Also, make sure your consumers understand the reasons for providing their data and have a section on the form showing they have given their consent.

Why Capture Matters to You

By not asking for more detail, or asking the same questions twice, the Capture building block process supports progressive profiling. Through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), progressive profiling allows you to request more PII as the consumer journey advances. As a result, users’ profiles increase the more they deal with you. You then allow and encourage customers to build their own accounts and central profiles.

These profiles work well if you have multiple sub-brands or other services for consumers. Users sign up once and maintain their account to access all you have to offer on your website. This process is easy for consumers and allows convenient tracking for you to obtain better insights about customer habits.

At the same time, Capture allows you to employ such options like identity proofing and password checking against denial lists to improve security during transactions. These elements can help make sure that these are real consumers signing up for your events, services and products.

What Do You Want From Registration?

In addition, the Capture building block of the CIAM setup allows you to choose the kind of form that best meets your needs. A traditional registration allows you to validate email addresses, perform fraud checks, establish rules about password lengths and character types and include other form requirements.

For a social registration, you can get access to viable social identity provider sources to establish a social login. A social login uses information from a social media service, such as LinkedIn, to sign in to your website instead of having users create a new login account.

If desired, you can capture consent on tracking, analytics, processing and more with just a checkbox on the form. You can even adjust the user interface and experience in CIAM by adding widgets and developer-created solutions. Whatever you feel is essential to capture customers’ attention and PII at the start, CIAM solutions help you stay in control to make that decision.

What’s Next for Your CIAM Rollout?

Capture is the first step to ensure all requirements get aligned throughout the life cycle of consumer engagement in the CIAM architecture. By using Capture, your users can establish a single sign-on for the rest of the CIAM building blocks. From there, you’ll have a seamless flow across multiple devices as you share context across digital touch points. Meanwhile, you get a central profile you can use to upsell or promote more events and communicate with your customers more.

Your ultimate goal is to capture, nurture and grow customers through personalized experiences that offer them privacy, control and transparency. The possibilities are endless for you, as long as you properly add the other three building blocks: Engage, Manage and Admin. We’ll discuss those building blocks in more detail in future blogs.

Register to read more about the benefits of CIAM.