Customers are the lifeline for any successful business. They are at an advantage in this information age. Spoilt for choice getting the customers attention has given rise to stiff competition among businesses. The internet age has given an equal platform for businesses of varying sizes. A small business entity can easily compete with a giant brand. It is the experience that counts for the customer more than brand value, or in other words it is the experience that creates brand value and helps a small business face up to a bigger brand. A study by RightNow found 89 percent customers started doing business with a competitor owing to poor customer experience, while on the other hand 60 percent customers were willing to pay extra for better customer experience.

As is known for any web business their website is the first point of contact with a customer. Apart from applying the tried and trusted rules to ensure the look and feel of the website is appealing and garners interest, an important factor that ensures customers or users spend their time on your website is the registration process. A lengthy registration process is a put off for most users as data reveals 50 percent users will leave your website instead of going through the registration process. In case of users who already have an account 90 percent will abandon their session instead of retrieving a forgotten password.

Registration forms can adversely impact conversion with users abandoning your website right at the first step of engagement. Customer identity management solution has emerged as the rightful solution for all registration relation vows. Not only does it provide for customised registration forms, it provides for easy access to millions of users with an existing social network id’s, like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or pinterest etc. Additionally the Single Sign-On feature is a perfect boon for online businesses with multiple web properties.

The Single Sign-On enables users to gain access to multiple web properties using just one set of credentials. As an example if a web business A not just has a web property for A it has additional web properties in shape of B,C,D going up to any number. The user using the credentials that help him gain access to web property A can use the same credentials to gain access to B,C,D or any number of websites owned by the business. The result, user has a seamless experience accessing multiple web properties belonging to the business. In turn SSO provides for exceptional benefits to the business.

Reduces the costs involved in maintaining help desks that are commissioned to reset passwords. As Single sign-on requires one single set of credentials, it is easy for the user to recall, minimising the chances for password reset requests. As per Gartner 20 to 50 percent of calls made to the help desk are for password reset which can be a sizeable expense as noted by Forrester which states password reset can cost as much as $70.

As customer experience has an influential bearing on the way your website performs. SSO as a feature enables seamless access to multiple web properties aligned to a business, making the process of authentication cakewalk or a pleasant experience, that keeps customers interested.

As web SSO provides for a central authentication point, the SSO service it remarkably improves on security, drastically limiting the chances of phishing.

It is a B2B collaboration enabler, enterprises allowing trading partners, service providers, suppliers, and affiliates access not only to their data but also to certain company-owned applications through extranets. With web SSO, businesses can centralize management of authentication and enable users to login once and then instantly gain access to all participating partners’ shared applications. In turn, this will allow those users to perform their duties in a fraction of the time. By accelerating collaboration, businesses can significantly reduce production time and deliver products and services on schedule.

It provides for a unified picture about the customer gaining sight from the customer’s activities across different web properties. In other words the business enabling SSO can gauge the customer activities through its different web properties knowing better about the customer, his interests and inclination towards a particular product or content by the time he spends on a particular web page or product description. As web single login is mobile friendly it further gives businesses insight on just web properties but the devices the customer uses to gain access to aligned web properties. The first party data that the business collects through SSO gives businesses an opportunity to personalise and ensure the customer has a pleasant experience interacting or transacting with the business.

The above mentioned features clearly identify the advantages web single sign-on as a means of identification on multiple websites can give businesses alongside the much desired customer experience. Businesses enabling CIM solutions can be sure that they have an edge over competition, while customer related valuable data is securely taken care by a third party vendor, available to the business at the click of a button anywhere in the internet connected world.