The Overlooked Customers We Need to Start Paying More Attention To [Intermediate]

Well, unfortunately, there are millions of people that are excluded every day. Even the most beautifully designed, secure, compliant solutions are excluding lots of potential customers. And it's not because of a bug, it's design choices that are baked in from day one. And I'm really passionate about this topic. So inclusion, accessibility, and customer identity. And I'm going to spend 20 minutes talking to you about that. When we look at SIEM, it's a balancing act.

So cost, security, and user experience. But if you focus too much on security, you're going to create friction in the user experience for people. And if you're too focused on user experience, then you potentially open yourself up to risk. If you are too cost-driven, you're going to end up cutting corners on both. We surveyed 4,500 CEOs, and it's really no surprise we saw 31% of them are worried about cyber threats, significantly worried.

Of course, with AI, it's becoming even worse. Only 30% are confident about revenue growth over the next 12 months. We have geopolitical things happening, tariffs. But they're very different concerns than what we see from customers. We did a customer experience survey, and we saw that 75% of consumers feel that the brands they're doing business with don't even think about whether or not they want the technology that they're using. So I'd like to talk about what we can do about that. I think everyone agrees that customer experience is very important.

But when budgets get tight, it's often the first thing that is deprioritized. So I want to talk about the uncomfortable question, how important is it really? When we looked at the customer experience survey, we saw 52% of consumers say they stopped buying from a brand because of an experience they had with the products or services. But it's not about price. It's about how it felt to interact with those organizations. And at the same time, we see that 75% of the executives surveyed said that customer expectations are evolving faster than their ability to keep up.

We're competing in an AI fuel maze, consistency is key. And it's not about a lack of awareness. It's about the agility, lack of agility. They can't keep up. We also did a CEO survey a few years back. So this one was in 2021. But what we're seeing is that nothing's changing. So 70% of executives said last year that they can't keep up with customer demands. Five years ago, they said, what is the number one thing? Over 75% said, what is the main thing that's going to impact profitability in their industry?

Sorry, 56% of them said changing customer demands and preferences. So this has been going on for a while. It's hard to keep up. Nothing's changing. If we look at the industries, the areas that are most heavily impacted, financial services, technology, media, consumer markets, the CEOs that reported this aren't from niche industries. The one thing that they have in common is that they're serving large, diverse customer bases. And when the preferences shift, the impact on their business is going to be really significant.

And these are industries where getting customer identity right really matters the most. We also did a market winner survey. And what we found, we did this five years ago, but I actually think that the data is more compelling now. But we asked the top 15% of most successful businesses, we asked them, what are they doing to keep up with customer demands and preferences? What are they doing to be successful? And we saw they use technology to help drive transformation, not as the vehicle. They understand that trust in their products is a key market differentiator.

Identity is literally built on trust. They break down the silos within their business. SIEM sits at the intersection of security, compliance, IT, marketing. They prioritize strategy and leadership. But the number one thing that market winners do is relentlessly focus on the customer experience. SIEM touches every single one of these things. And 75% of the market winners that we surveyed told us that they were focusing their efforts in three areas.

So one, they have a clear understanding of the requirements from the customer's perspective. Second, they continuously design and update the customer experience. A lot of times we build authentication flows, we ship them, we move on. But how often are we truly going back to understand how customers are experiencing them?

And third, they continuously capture user feedback and measure the results of change. How often are we measuring if it works for everyone, not just the Happy Path users? And how often can a SIEM program say that they're honestly doing all three of these things? And no matter what type of product or service you sell, it all starts here. It starts with the login page. But it's not just another screen. It's really a health check of the processes that you have. The backend flows, the logic.

But as builders, I think we need to ask ourselves the question, are we doing enough with this first step in the user journey? Are we measuring success beyond were they just able to log in? Did they get in? Are we really looking at it from a broad and inclusive mindset? You'd be amazed at how many people get stuck on this process. And when we look at the unhappy flows, onboarding, this is often the number one most troublesome experience for customers.

Self-service, are we empowering them regardless of any limitations or lack of abilities that they have to manage their user journey in the best way possible? For confirmation, are we giving people the choice to choose an authentication method that best suits their needs and abilities? And for recovery, if they lose their phone, are we considering a wide range of scenarios when we choose the method that they need to recover their account? But these are often the user journeys that we're considered that we're testing the least when we test SIEM solutions.

And I'd like to kind of put some numbers to this. If we look in the Netherlands, that's where I live, 2.6 million people can't independently manage their own finances. And an even smaller amount has to completely delegate that to someone else. If we look here in Germany, over half the population lacks even basic digital skills. That means ability to send an email. And EU-wide, that's 40% of the population. But when they can't do it, millions of people are expected to go through the same MFA flows. And when they can't do it, it's not a problem with them.

It's a problem with the way that we're designing solutions. And it's not just nice to have. We also have the European Accessibility Act that went into effect last year. Has to be perceivable. Can all users sense it? Think about contrast, captions, screen flows, operable. Can all users interact with it? There shouldn't be time pressure or any gestures that they're unable to perform. Are they able to understand it? Does it have plain language? Are the errors clear? Is the navigation predictable? And it needs to be robust.

It needs to work across all technologies today and what we're doing for tomorrow. I'm sure we all know the person that has the iPhone 5 that they just refuse to get rid of. So we need to think about whether what we're designing works for everyone.

Yeah, I was doing a bit of research just kind of looking at trying to understand a range of scenarios that people might struggle with. And Dr. Devin Price, I can imagine, he has ADHD, he has trouble switching between forms and codes and putting them in. And Trip O'Dell, I didn't think about someone with dyslexia, how difficult CAPTCHA might be for them. But these are not unique cases. There are so many different scenarios that we're not thinking about or maybe that we don't imagine. We can't build for every single person, but we need to think it's not just about us.

We need to make sure that we're not designing as engineers and developers, but that we're considering a wide range of scenarios. I can use myself as an example. I've been living in the Netherlands for a while. I'm from the US and I have a lot of financial ties still there. Any time I need to perform step-up authentication, I have to call customer service because I can only register a US phone number and I don't have one. So to try to get around this, I bought a second cell phone and a US SIM card and had it sent to my 75-year-old mother's house and asked her to set it up for me.

She got onto a video call with me because she was really struggling. And 45 minutes later, we ended the call and I was still calling customer service afterwards. I had to take care of that the next time I went to visit. But this is not, you see, to a face, a nightmare for global nomads. And this is becoming more common after COVID especially. So we need to think it's not just disabilities, visible or non-visible. It's the context of people's life. And it's not just a specific group of customers. When we talk about inclusivity, it's tempting to think that we're solving for a niche.

But these are common issues that everyone has. My needs aren't understood. I have to fill out tons of forms. I have reliance on the call center, limited choice of credentials. I have to type this really long password and remember it. We've all hit at least one of these pain points. But the difference is some of these people, we're able to kind of push through the friction of this, but some people simply can't. So inclusive design isn't about building things for a specific group of people. It's about fixing what's broken for everyone.

So the first thing that market winners do, we talked about requirements. As implementers of digital solutions, we're in the 5% of people with the highest level of computer literacy. And we need to not just look from our own perspective, but we need to consider a wide range of personas, wide range of abilities, visible, non-visible disabilities. How they use a product in their day-to-day life. And we need to allow choice. So giving someone the option to add face or fingerprint in addition to a pin code is not offering choice.

It's giving them the ability to replace the pin code with a different mean. Something that works for their situation, for their abilities. That's the difference when we talk about inclusion. That's the difference between making inclusion a checkbox item and instead making it part of our design philosophy. So what can we do about it?

Well, it starts here. We need to make sure that we're getting the buy-in and alignment of key stakeholders. Inclusive design does not happen in a silo. And we need to evaluate journeys from the user's perspective. So the people that are actually going through it. And we need to define and refine. It's not a one-time exercise. We need to continuously refine and look at how customers are perceiving the solutions that we have. And how do we build something that's actually going to work for everyone? But how do we evaluate journeys through the lens of the customer?

Well, we change our perspective. We focus on persona development. We look at customer feedback. Not just surveys or forms, but looking in the app store. See what people like, don't like. Read the feedback that's available online. And prototype. That really helps us to quickly build simulations of the customer experience and identify gaps. And when we do that with a range of personas, it really helps us to avoid disaster later. But the key thing, we need to research, have empathy, and iterate. Clear understanding of what's required.

So user experience should be simple, easy, and flexible for as many people as possible. We need to have reference requirements. For example, can 98% of people complete an action within a specified timeframe? Well-designed customer touch points. That's not colors and logos. That's how people interact with the service. We need to look at the relationship between digital identity and devices. For example, smartwatches. Consistent experience. The flows across channels. People need to recognize that as part of the same experience. And customer satisfaction.

We need to continuously evaluate processes and collect feedback, not only externally, but also internally. Talking to other teams. Talking to customer experience teams. Customer service. The second thing market winners do. The key word here is continuously. They continuously design and update the customer experience. Customer demands change. Organizations, products, and services are continuously evolving. Compliance and legislation changes. We talked about the European Accessibility Act. And of course, technologies mature and new ones emerge.

We need to revisit every time one of these areas shift. We need to revisit our design. And one of these is always going to be changing. And this brings us to silos. When teams operate in silos, it's going to lead to disconnected journeys. So one touch point doesn't know what happens at another. We have synchronization and data reuse limitations. Customers are asked for the same information over and over again. Credential duplication. We have multiple accounts, multiple passwords. That creates more points of friction.

So for customers that already struggle, this is, it's not just inconvenient for them. This is a brick wall. And then also changes to parts shouldn't negatively affect the overall structure. So when we build customer identity processes into complex business applications, it's going to lead to longer time to market. It becomes impossible to implement certain features altogether. And reuse of capabilities and logic, just completely forget it. When you change an identity process in one place, when you have it built into applications, you are potentially going to cause the entire wall to collapse.

But when you put capabilities in a central place, then you only need to update one time. And we have the one-size-fits-all problem. When we don't offer choice, we're going to end up forcing non-preferred means on customers. Authentication methods, for example, that don't work for their situation. We have channel inappropriate use of means. Having to type long, complex passwords on a mobile phone screen. And use of insecure means. So when it's too difficult for someone, they will find a workaround, which then opens you up to risk.

But these, you know, aren't edge cases. These are design choices that we're making. So we just need to keep in mind that we need to offer meaningful alternatives and let customers choose what best fits their life, their context, their situation. But even when you've done every single thing right, you have a centralized system, you've extracted identity from channels, you don't have any silos. We need to keep in mind that customer experience demands shift fast. Technology evolves, regulations change.

We need to continuously ask ourselves, not have we reached our target, but are we structured in a way that won't impact us when change comes? So don't get stuck on the fixed target state, assume change will happen and design for it. So to summarize, we need to break down the silos, centralize CM capabilities, externalize them from applications, use technology as part of the solution, not the solution itself, and make sure to design with flexibility in mind. The third thing that market winners do, they remember that something that you designed today might not work tomorrow.

But if it's not right the first time, we can fix it. So we need to have a base for improvements. We discuss customer feedback, looking at operational marketing KPIs. We a lot of times look at things like tickets, incident, uptime. At CM solution teams, we get P1 incidents come in, but are we really hearing the customers that are contacting customer service because they're struggling with something very simple that we've designed and we never hear about that? So talking to other teams, getting that information, we need to observe, learn, and improve in order to reach goals. Yep.

Digital identity is not the sun. Not everything revolves around it, as weird as it is for someone that works in that space to say it, but it's just one piece of the puzzle. So there are a lot of tools available. We need to tap into what already exists, partner with the teams that own them, make sure that we're not operating in our own universe and collecting the feedback that's there, because it is there. We need to build better relationships with other teams outside of the identity space. There's tons of data. Like I said, we look at uptime incidents, but is that enough?

If we process failure and abandonment, failure lockout of means, can we see if there's a correlation between the time to authenticate and failure rates? If you have password and another means, can we look at the choices people are making to give us more insights into what they think, how they feel? So the key message here, don't guess, measure. And of course, being proactive. If you start to see pay points, if you're measuring, you're talking to other teams, then try to fix them. Test the journeys, get feedback.

Don't wait until you're being told through negative feedback or customers leaving to fix the problems. Get ahead of the curve, identify the fix yourself, prevent yourself from being in the position where they leave you.

And well, amazing that I'm on time. To sum it up, market winners do three things. They look from the customer's point of view, they evaluate the journey from the customer's perspective, they continuously improve solutions, and they measure results, looking at all sorts of feedback. Customer identity, it's challenging because it is a balance. You're constantly trying to balance between security and experience, compliance and usability, ideal versus what's actually achievable. But inclusive CM design isn't about perfection. It's about choosing to look beyond just the happy path users.

Design for real people with real limitations, looking at the context of their life. Because when we get it right, everyone benefits. So I'd like to just kind of leave you with a challenge. If you work in the customer identity space, maybe next time you're designing, reviewing, building a CM solution, really stop and ask yourself, who am I potentially leaving behind? And that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.