Getting a holistic view of your customer in the digital age

Technology has permeated every aspect of marketing. From the disruptive use of programmatic, to ingenious applications of artificial intelligence, brands today must learn to adopt and optimise technology to ensure the best experiences for their consumers.

With the shift to all things digital, increasingly there has been an added focus on customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions.

According to Okta’s State of CIAM in Asia-Pacific 2022 survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) stated they have a good or expert understanding of how customer identity and access management systems work.

However, despite the high level of awareness and adoption among APAC organisations, maturity remains low as brands lack expertise to implement more advanced solutions in this space, explained chief marketing officer John Zissimos (pictured) in an interview done in collaboration with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.

A veteran in the marketing and customer experience space before Okta, Zissimos was VP of brand, creative, and media at Google, and was pivotal to building the Google Cloud business globally. He also spent a number of years working with the likes of Salesforce and ad agencies such as Chiat\Day, McCann Erickson, and J. Walter Thompson.

He explained that today, the journey a consumer goes on is vastly different from even that of five years ago. As such, one of the biggest issues plaguing marketers is the difficulty in gaining a single view of their customers – which is crucial in any brand’s effort in personalisation.

So what are the barriers?

Okta’s survey highlighted that the biggest barrier to CIAM implementation was the risk of adversely impacting the user experience (61%), with many struggling to get this right. Other challenges included the lack of available in-house expertise (42%), and the need to create a business case to justify implementation (30%).

Zissimos further explained that CIAM solutions can help businesses overcome this challenge, given they sit at the intersection of security, customer experience (CX), and analytics. Providing an easy, frictionless way for users to onboard and log in is critical for driving conversions and building customer loyalty.

Customer identity and access management (CIAM) systems can also help organisations leverage their knowledge of the customer to build more relevant and higher converting digital experiences. The right solution enables a complete 360-degree view of customer profiles and preferences by consolidating and centralising user data across various sources, including both internal and third-party systems.

“This unified view provides for a better understanding of who your customers are and what they want, so that you can tailor your outreach and campaigns for a more effective marketing strategy,” he adds.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: With data privacy being a huge concern, and different markets having different laws, how can brands create a consistent experience for consumers?

Zissimos: The first step is to take the time to fully understand the different regulations in the various jurisdictions the brand operates in. In this way, brands will be better equipped to find the commonalities between these regulations, and formulate a way to provide a consistent brand experience for their consumers across different markets.

At Okta, we have actually set up a data residency resource page on our website to serve as a one-stop resource page for our customers on all things data privacy and data residency, as well as to ensure a consistent and compliant brand experience for customers.

In this way, we are helping customers understand how their data is kept secure, and how our industry-leading privacy safeguards and security controls enable them to operate with the confidence that can help achieve or even exceed privacy and compliance requirements.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: Are there any new technologies or trends that you think will revolutionise how we do marketing today?

Zissimos: Artificial intelligence and machine learning will definitely come into play to automate some of the marketing job functions in the years to come.

The metaverse, while still in its developmental stage, also offers much promise to revolutionise the way brands interact with their consumers. The level of immersive-ness offered by the metaverse is quite unprecedented, and I’m holding my breath to see what kind of new experiences brands and marketers alike can come up with in the not-so-distant future.

What I can be sure of, though, is that it will herald very exciting changes to the marketing function in time to come.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What is Okta’s mission at the moment?

Zissimos: At Okta, we are striving to accelerate a world where everyone can safely use any technology and any device through secure, seamless digital identity. We bring simple and secure access to people and organisations everywhere.

This means we promise not only to protect the identities of our customers’ workforce and users, but to also constantly ask ourselves what more we can enable and realise in terms of using technology to empower and transform the world.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: B2B has a reputation of being rather tactical, content/white paper heavy. As a B2B marketer, how do you make your brand stand out?

Zissimos: As B2B marketers, the challenge lies in how we can be a bit more creative in our marketing strategies to stand out from the crowd and cut through the noise.

At Okta, what we have been trying to do over the past few years is to communicate with the customer in mind. We try as much as possible to understand what some of the pain points are that customers have been facing when implementing digital identity solutions, for example. Then we communicate with targeted messaging that helps address these issues.

Customer case studies also help us to highlight the key benefits of adopting our solutions. In this way, we balance our communications from the perspective of what the brand wants to say, with what the customer wants to hear.