This sponsored post is produced by Gigya.
There’s nothing more maddening than searching through a sea of emails just to remember an old login ID and password. Whether it’s commenting in a forum, making an online purchase, or streaming an album on Spotify, registration has become commonly painful for online users. What’s even worse is that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of every username and password associated with these individual digital properties. It’s why so many online sites are now relying on an easy authentication option with social profile integration. Why waste time filling out rows of information, when one can authenticate with a couple of clicks using existing Facebook credentials?
Convenience is one of the main drivers for consumers to use social authentication, as demonstrated in a 2015 report by Gigya, a respected technology company that provides global enterprises with an extensive customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform. In the report, 88 percent of U.S. consumers said they had used social login to connect with sites and apps; 56 percent of respondents said they used social authentication to avoid filling out registration forms; while 43 percent did it so they wouldn’t have to keep track of yet another username and password.
Suresh Sridharan, Senior Director of Technology & Product Strategy at Gigya, spoke with VentureBeat about the appeal of Gigya’s customer identity management platform and how it differs from more traditional and on-premises identity management solutions.
“We are a cloud-based solution, which means that where you’re coming from — whichever part of the world — you can actually customize the solution based on that region,” Sridharan said. “If the customer is actually sitting in China, then you have the ability to provide login information based on social networks in China.”
By providing a seamless registration flow and customer experience that is relevant to the end-user, he or she will be more motivated and likely to keep engaging with a brand or business.
Despite third-party authentication via social media credentials providing an easy solution for users, the vast number of social identity providers can be a hassle for marketers. We’re not living in a world populated solely by MySpace anymore. Differing authentication protocols from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn — not to mention China’s QZone or India’s Orkut — can make integrating and maintaining a complete identity management system challenging for marketers and IT professionals looking to personalize digital experiences. Sridharan spoke about the ways businesses are dealing with this issue.
“It’s a mix of different solutions, because there are existing solutions that help the customer in determining segmentation. Most of the time we see customers utilizing existing identity management solutions or existing in-house solutions they’ve built. And that’s not really scalable, because it’s built on older systems. It’s not really cloud-based. In order to bring in data from external sources, they need to customize it extensively and it’s not really scalable.”
For more about how global enterprises are using customer identity management solutions for growth and personalization, check out the rest of VentureBeat’s interview with Sridharan.
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