Do you know what’s there behind the entire customer experience strategy? According to surveys and discussions the digital business initiatives are becoming the main driving factor behind every long-term business strategy. As with the exceptional growth in mobile technology, customers are becoming more dependent on mobile and online transactions, hence brands are shifting their delivery of products and services to digital methods. Although, this digital shifting of services has shuffled almost everything throughout the organization but the IT teams who are devoted to build customer facing apps, portals and programs are most noticeably affected by all this.
IT professionals are not only required to meet the demand of increased mobile apps but they are also expected to create the apps that are versatile enough to serve a wider variety of functions and complexity across a range of different channels particularly those that rely upon customer identity data. To help IT departments quickly roll out the new apps there is a concept of identity application programming interfaces (identity APIs). These APIs shorten the time by eliminating the need of recreating the code and improves customer experience by leveraging already existing customer data. Additionally, these identity APIs also reduce the risk associated with data breach by supporting the security best practices.
Identity APIs offers unique customer profile data including individual customer attributes, communication choices, privacy preferences and relationships to other identities and devices. Identity APIs also enable functionalities like password recovery, customer identity management and privacy and preference enforcement in every app at every customer touch point.
So if you are moving forward with identity APIs, here are some point to help you get started:
Getting to the data:
First find out where your potential data is located and then develop a strategy to assemble all this disperse information about a customer to get an unified customer view.
Data querying for your API:
You need to have a framework that cater your queries and data as per some already existing standards such as SCIM.
Data governance through APIs:
Make sure you have applied data governance policies across multiple applications. One way to do this is by automating enforcement through APIs.
Define secure access to your APIs:
Clearly define what data your app can access and don’t forget to secure your communication with SSL/TLS.
Building identity APIs is very time consuming and efforts are well spent but you get the benefits of efficiency and quality identity services that further increases data security throughout the organization.
