In the post-COVID economy, customer experience must be frictionless and tethered to tight security and privacy, says this authentication expert.

With people now sheltering, working and shopping from home—looking for contactless delivery and trying to obtain basic services in the new normal is creating challenges and opportunities for businesses.

The obvious challenge is, if you were not already on the tail end of digital transformation you suddenly find yourself quickly adapting. If you have already been digitally transformed—you are now looking to enhance what you can do to be more seamless.

Your customers wonder why they cannot interact with you the way they want. The choice now is not waiting or hoping but switching to someone who can. This crisis has created risks and opportunities that simply were not in the playbook before. The nature and magnitude of the shift may be structural or temporary, but one thing is for sure: it will have profound implications for life in a post-pandemic world. The way people conduct their lives in the new normal will likely accelerate digital interaction as the norm rather than an option.

We now have to ensure security, safety and convenience to meet the needs of the new normal. The need for a customer experience that is unified and consistent across all channels; enabling an ‘anywhere, anytime’ experience is now a mandate. Traditionally, each channel is siloed, having its own security, authentication and fraud mitigation methodology. This creates friction and frustration for the consumer as the level of risk will dictate the service that can be provided. Furthermore, it is expensive for the business to deploy and manage, and it is a boon for the fraudster that seeks out the weakest link in the chain.

Our current situation can no longer trade off security for customer experience and must create consistent customer journeys. Just look at Zoom and why they succeeded (simple, easy and consistent)—but they forgot to focus on security and privacy.

The emergence of digital as the dominant channel creates the opportunity for businesses to rethink their security paradigm, allowing them to pivot to a customer-centric model that not only delivers a better customer experience, but also unlocks the true power of digital transformation.

A new paradigm for security: S.A.T

The way forward is a new security paradigm that takes advantage of the rapid growth of mobile engagement, by positioning the businesses own mobile app at the center of a new, security paradigm enabling organizations to adapt to the current digital-only world.

The idea is simple: leverage the capabilities of the mobile platform to create a layered, security architecture, use the ease-of-use of mobile apps to create a frictionless, customer friendly security experience, and then extend the benefits of this security to all customer channels. The objective: Secure, Authenticate, Transact.

  • Secure
    With digital-only customers, businesses today face a variety of new threat vectors that impact the connection between the business and their customer, and are at the root of most breaches and fraud. These threat vectors can broadly be categorized as device, identity and network threats. Security must allow the business to Trust the Device, Trust the User, Secure the Connection and Secure the Data.
  • Authenticate
    Modern security and regulatory requirements mandate that businesses use secure customer authentication (SCA). Enterprises require a much better and stronger model for authentication that is invisible to the customer experience; leverages mobile as part of the authentication flow for other channels; mutual and simultaneous authentication between the customer and the business; and multi-factor identity for user, app and device.
  • Transact
    A service to send secure, strongly authenticated notifications and verify transactions in a highly secure manner that has full non-repudiation built in through the use of strong authentication, digital signatures, data-in-transit encryption, and geo-tagging to enable businesses to thrive in a digital-only world.

Frictionless security is key

Organizations must create consistent customer journeys in digital-only interactions that are completely secured against the modern pandemic-driven threat environment.

Solutions are available that can enable any channel to service any request any time, including transaction verification and proactive marketing promotions, in a secure, frictionless way.

Unifying endpoint, identity and channel security solutions into one, integrated, customer-experience-focused platform that enables businesses to secure, authenticate and transact with their customers across all channels.

Even in a rapidly changing threat environment, a business should not have to trade-off strong security for customer experience.