Rashmi Vittal - Earn Your Customers’ Trust: Building Deep Customer Relationships Gradually through Progressive Identity

All right. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. I love being here.

We're, we're thrilled to sponsor this event and, and we've been with pooping, our calls since Seattle and through Paris. And now we're concluding here in, in Singapore, but it's been a whirlwind of year. And I think one of the key things, when, when we talk about building deep customer relationship, there's, there's something that you have to kind of first take a step back and, and realize. And one of that is fact kind, what are some of the trends that are driving customer identity initiatives throughout? I think yesterday and today we've been hearing a lot about these trends, right?

You know, how do you drive a better customer experience when you think about that? Right.

And the, we, we look at it from this point of view of the customer experience is about giving that person that right message at the right time, with that level of personalization that they are expecting. And it doesn't happen just in a single channel, it really has to happen across multiple channels or wherever that digital touchpoint and that interaction between user and brand occurs.

Now, of course, you can't just think about customer experience in the silo. It's very tightly integrated and, and intertwined with ensuring that your storing, managing processing and using personal data in a privacy and compliant manner.

And, and with the increased kind of regulatory environment that we're in, we're recognizing that CIM solutions have to expand to be able to accommodate. And if not helps in the standard for how you can help manage this type of personal data. And fundamentally, we heard also in the past couple of days, that security is a most importance within, in today's realm of data breaches.

You have to ensure that in the fact that, you know, cm solutions are storing PII, very personal customer information, your, your security has to be paramount, not only just in being able to connect a user to a brand through the authentication and access mechanisms are there, but then that you're storing and managing that data, following all the latest InfoSec requirements that are, that are there. So kind of to put this into context, I was like thinking about customer identity in the context of the customer journey.

And while we all get that the customer journey can be absolutely complex and it can have various inputs and various outputs in different times, we are just using this simple model, just kind of to tell this, this greater story. So we all agree that, that we understand what a customer journey is, right? It's that user, that user's introduction to a brand or a business or to a product in the service.

And it typically takes the, the, the idea of going from awareness to consideration, to conversion, and then hopefully somebody that's becoming a known, loyal brand advocate, but I'd submit that traditionally access management solutions really fall kind of in a very narrow category within the customer journey, mostly focusing strongly around just that registration as a service or social login experience, maybe thinking of modern ways to think about authenticating and federating access to between users and brands.

And so you think about, you know, biometrics that's coming online, you think about, again, the depth password people wanna really look towards password passwordless authentication. However, CIM is much broader than that should be considered much broad broader than that, especially as it's the integral part of your customer identity strategy. What CIM really is, is about how do we engage with the user as early as possible in that customer journey so that we can build upon that identity and profile in a progressive manner.

But I'd submit that customer experiences oftentimes feels like a game of Schutze and ladders. How many people here know Schutze and ladders outside of the us is called snakes and ladders. Okay.

Well, if you think about it, right, the game itself is one of pure chance, but the symbols are really meant as lessons in the binary system of morality, right? Schutze or snakes or vices and ladders are virtues that help you move forward. And it might be a simple way to think about it, but that's truly kind of the way you should think about engaging in a, in a trusted two relationship with your customer, especially in today's interconnected digital world.

And what happens is that just for every opportunity you have to win or delight your customers with a ladder of a situation frequently, businesses will also also frankly, frustrate or annoy customers with a, with a, with a shoot, right? And if you do so in a, in a way that can be as intrusive to a customer, you can turn them off not only from your product or service from, or from your brand entirely. And that's something that obviously you don't want to lose a customer and avoid some examples that we see of, of this in today's world. Let's take a detail in e-commerce, right.

I wanna be able to see relevant accessories that pair well with my recent purchase. Okay. So I bought pair of jeans online, and now I go back online again, and the ads that follow me around, I'd love to be maybe a cute pair of shoes that go with the jeans or a nice jacket, but instead the more often than not the negative experience is the fact that I am now being followed around for the next two weeks, by the exact same pair of jeans I just purchased. Right? Another example, let's take health and wellness, right? I'm receiving content only for what I have consented to receive.

So I sign up for a slow carb diet recipe newsletter, and I know I'm only gonna get that newsletter once a week, and sure enough, within a couple of days that newsletter's popping up in my inbox, but what happens about 10 or two weeks later, 10 days or two weeks later is the fact that now my inbox is exploding and I'm receiving newsletters that I've never signed up for about cardiovascular health or the top five foods to promote high antioxidants. I did not sign up for those. I did not consent to it. That is a negative experience.

And when you think the next kind of idea, and you overlay, you know, that intersection between identity and customer journey, you really have to focus on privacy and security. And I love for Catherine covered in the sense that it, it really is. I think there is a groundswell movement that's happening with consumers today, and the fact that they, frankly just don't trust brands with their personal information.

And it's, it's a yin yang effect because on one hand research shows that consumers convert. I have a higher likely rate to convert when something is personalized to them. But on the other hand, two thirds are saying that they just don't trust brands with their personal information. And what it really kind of comes down to is when you think about trust.

And, and, and I love what was said earlier about trust and transparency, but trust, if I had to think of it as an equation, trust is equal to transparency and control, right? And consumers are demanding. These two things. Accenture did conducted this research on interviewing thousands of consumers and getting their feedback. And over 70% said that they are fine with their personal data being used if they knew exactly how it was to be used. And more than that, over three fourths said that they're fine with their personal data to be used if they have control over how it's to be used.

So how do you go about regaining trust with these types of consumers? Well, I ID submit that regulations like GDPR is really about putting the customer in control of their data fundamentally, right? And so if we all know about GDPR, and I think it is gonna be the north star, that people are gonna try and, and, and satisfy and support and in doing so, I think a lot of the other regulations will be covered as well. But fundamentally, if you just think about the data collected businesses today, collect tremendous amounts of data, right?

We could collect that profile data, location, data, obviously registration data. We talked yesterday a little bit about behavioral data. There's tons of data that could be collected, but now that needs to be balanced along with the individual rights of the user, right. And GDPR really puts these individual rights forward. As you know, right. A user must have the right to be informed. They must have the right to access their profile information. They must have the, the right to be able to freeze or delete their account, right.

And they must have the right to, to download their data, data, and port that data over. And as I talked about, you know, these, these regulations are evolving. It isn't just about what's happening in the EU or being, if, if you transact with EU citizens and you're supporting the European, and this is happening everywhere, right. Russia a couple years ago really drove home. The fact that it needs to have its data, residency laws, China, and, and, and now came into effect the, the cybersecurity law back in June, we're seeing now the Philippines is following a similar set of regulations as GDPR.

In fact, GDPR is their reference manual for how they're gonna be setting up privacy. And if you heard yesterday from J I mean, people love to share and they love to give in the Philippines. So culturally, there's gonna be a big shift or change, especially if those regulations come forward. So we definitely have those challenges. And I guess what I would submit is the fact that when you think about customer identity, it's not just a black or white situation, right? Customer identity is not binary. It's not known or unknown.

It's not unregistered or registered, but in fact, what it is, is how can I deliver on this value for information exchange earlier in the cycle, in the journey and with the appropriate level of ask, right? So if I am a user, I know what kind of value I want at the awareness stage. I'm learning, I'm figuring things out. I'm maybe price comparing. Maybe I'm doing things as I'm moving through the consideration stage, right?

And so first off, when you think about capturing information, you know, when you are anonymous, when you're going through this anonymously, right, you're having these anonymous interactions there's information today, that's being captured right off that cookie ID or mobile ad ID. Those things can certainly be used, but as, as a user is moving along the journey into consideration, there's an opportunity to start, you know, grabbing little bits of information in exchange for delivering them value.

And I think a great example of this and something that we call light registration is the fact that why not be able to offer them something, whether it's for them to sign up for a newsletter, whether it's for them to submit an email, to get a promotional offer, maybe they want to just use contact us form, and they want to send their, their mobile phone number in, you know, light registration is something where I call it. You know, once you get the email of somebody that they've consented to, they've voluntarily given to you because they, they know they're gonna get exchanged. Some value.

That email is now what I call the gateway identifier to, to understanding who your customer is, right? And then you go further, right? You go into that convergence stage, whether that's on a retail site or a commerce site, and they're, they're going through checkout. They now want to create an account profile or whether that is, or whether that is, and somebody who wants to sign up for an online public publication, right. That conversion is the opportunity to do a full registration. And I would say this, you know, we all know we heard from the gentleman yesterday from I think wa wave stone.

The fact that a lot of times what we're competing with is not perhaps one another in terms of the vendor space, but what it is is just DIY that there's a lot of legacy registration as a service implementations out there. And frankly, it's just based on really antiquated technologies and capabilities and what registration as a service now that you get off of the cm platforms is Mar right.

You, you can handle the latest in the biometric authentication. You can really consider and think about, you know, one time password or passwordless authentication, and obviously can support a much wider range of social network extend than we've ever been able to do before. And then when you think, as you're moving along that journey, and once you've converted, you now have that full registered account account profile. It's not really about now, how do you add on profile attributes about that consumer? How do you do so in a way that's a natural, organic part of that user experience.

And this is where, you know, things like progressive or conditional profiling is a key aspect of this building, building these identities in a progressive way. You know, we work with one customer who is, you know, kind of one of the largest outdoor apparel companies in the United States.

And, you know, you think about what are some of the events that might happen, where you might wanna be able to ask more questions? Well, maybe it's after the third login, right?

Or, or maybe it's after some kind of triggered event or perhaps, or perhaps they've actually gone and clicked on a product category around hiking boots. Now you wanna, you know, put up this type of question and the question that's really simple, you know, what favorite sports or activities are you into now notice that not only can you select that and submit it, and that now gets stored into the account profile, but you could actually click here to see and manage all of your preferences, right?

Giving that transparency back to the, back to the customer so that they can, they can look at what they've, what they've opted into throughout the course of their relationship with the brand. And I can hear this to say, I think fundamentally one of the key things is as you continue to enrich these customer profiles, is there turning into brand brand advocates to you. You wanna be able to synchronize those profiles to drive consistent personalization, personalization, where you have that identity and profile data.

And you can integrate that down into your downstream marketing sales and services applications, the businesses and the clients that we work with are extremely heterogeneous environments. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Every brand in and of itself could have easily four or five different types of solutions. And then each brand will have its own set of solutions. Then each market may have its own set set of solu solutions. So you're dealing very quickly with a very complex environment where you're trying to deliver that single view of profile across their digital stack.

And I think another key thing, and I like what was said earlier, this is something that we're increasingly seeing our clients ask for. And I know we'll ask for as a result of GDPR and on all the different regulations that are out there is how can you not only drive help me drive personalization, help me govern my personal data better. So governance, I think data governance is something in the consumer space.

That's going to be increasingly important so that I know that that identity and those profile attributes, I know those profile attributes that I've opted into are the ones that can be used to drive for that personalization. A lot of times companies are using things like data lakes to just dump any kind of data about their customer, to a data lake.

And then they put their team of, you know, of data scientists just come swarming into those data lakes that each have their own projects to kind of figure out what different mathematical problem they're trying to solve in terms of who, knowing who their customer is. Well, when you start just dumping information, personal information like that into a data lake, how do you know which profile attributes are the ones you're allowed to use?

How do you know which identities have opted in for this type of analysis or better yet, whatever comes out of it, even if it's at a, at a segment level, the fact that you're gonna now contact and reach them through different, you know, targeting mechanisms, how do they know that they wanted that you don't because it becomes completely obscure. So another key area that, that we're seeing around synchronization of profiles is, is definitely around data governance.

And that goes really hand in hand with the fact that again, if you think about building identities progressively, it has to be done in a two way sharing approach founded on trust. And we know trust is based on transparency and control. And as a result of that, being able to manage consent throughout the life cycle of the customer is really important. And consent is, is, is comprised of, of different aspects.

And this has really created a category, a new category, I would say, in this space called enterprise preference management and, and the enter preference management is really about managing consent through the life cycle. And there's four key criteria in being able to do that.

One is that your solution must be able to present and capture the preferences and consent either whether that's at that registration point or whether it's even through cookie consent, if they're the first, if it's a first time visitor, but then also being able to capture consent on those marketing activities that we talked, talked about, those opting into those newsletters opting to those, to, to those promotional offers. And it isn't just about that type of communication, but it's also the frequency of the communication. That's really important.

And to, and then as well, if you, if you are, as a business are really relying on your mobile applications and you wanna be able to use location data off that mobile application to drive a marketing communication, guess what you now have to gain consent to use that location data as well. We all know that throughout the life cycle of a customer, things change and things need to get updated in terms of services, change, privacy, policy changes.

And so you must be able to have a solution that can trigger consent renewals capture and record that consent have the history of the consent throughout the lifespan of the customer, the customer relationship, and then know that that's, that's secure in an audit ready vault so that if you do come under regulatory scrutiny, you have the evidence to now show and demonstrate how you've been managing those throughout the, with the customer and the customer relationship. And the other key thing is that we don't wanna have to create yet another data silo.

I mean, capturing those records and that consent records is great, but if it just stored in your system, then it only serves kind of a, a, a very kind of narrow focus. One of the other key things about managing consent is to be able to now synchronize that consent to the downstream marketing sales and services applications. So if somebody is unsubscribed to a newsletter, I need to synchronize that with the email service provider. So they actually stop sending me the newsletter.

You know, it's a novel concept, but something as simple as that is today, very Inco inconsistently executed, and there's a bunch of other examples, and you can never stop thinking about the user access, right? Being able to give users control over their preferences and consent that they can go into a UI and see how their information is being stored. They can change and modify that information. They know that they have the privacy and what they, they can see when their terms, service, the date of what, of what they actually, what they actually consented to.

And they even have control over the personal data permission saying, yeah, you know, go ahead and use my full name for, for partners or, or other third party partners or no, you know what, stop using my email address. I'm really tired of getting inundated. And then below is kind of cut off, but you have to also be able to support those individual rights right within the UI. And then lastly is it's.

How do you also ensure that you're meeting the needs around communication preferences and making it really easy for the user to be able to withdraw consent on anything that they've previously consented to? So I think fundamentally when you think about building deep relationships, it's, it's in a two-way sharing approach as early and as often as possible across the customer journey.

Cuz ultimately what you're trying to do is turn this unknown user into known loyal customers and that's, and that's fundamentally the core around customer identity management platform and what, you know, PK has been out solving for, for, for, you know, well for well over 10 years. And this is also what became very attractive for SAP as they thought and looked at acquiring gig in as a need to be able to say, how can we build a better customer identity? How can we build a better profile? How can we build that golden record that can then be used to govern across your, your digital staff? Thanks.