Securing identity stitching across customer experience journeys to drive digital security (2023 Prediction #9)

Over the past decade, there has been a healthy tension regarding the “give-to-get” relationship between the information that consumers/clients/citizens are willing to disclose about themselves and the public or private services they digitally interact with in the retail, banking, and public sectors. Digital service delivery continues to grow in prevalence through an ever-growing range of engagement endpoints. They are supported by the increasingly sophisticated, data-driven use of AI and automation. Organizations engage with people through a range of physical, voice, social, web/app, e-mail, messaging, and chat channels, which further expand their knowledge. However, many organizations still treat each way of engagement as a separate customer experience (CX) channel, i.e. the data is not integrated with that from other channels.

This is where identity stitching becomes relevant as a mechanism to “stitch” matching identifier data (e.g., device IDs, e-mail addresses, account authentication) to create a unified view of a person across all engagement channels. This technique is of value for outreach, marketing, and contact center teams, as it keeps adding more insight into the individuals engaging with an organization. As organizations seek to gain more insight into customers, the appetite of hackers and other bad actors for customer-related data has been growing. However, in recent years, leading technology firms have provided significant support for users in managing the privacy of their digital footprint. Several prominent technology companies have adopted mechanisms to give individuals greater control over the use of their identities.

This has spurred an “arms race” to find alternative ways to identify an individual and stitch their digital interactions together. PAC predicts that the need to secure all elements of identity stitching will be of paramount importance in 2023, supported by customer identity and access management (CIAM) tools in conjunction with existing privacy technologies. This will allow organizations to retain an adequate level of insight, obfuscate individuals’ identities from hackers, and give individuals more control over their identities.

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This blog is part of a series of PAC’s 2023 Top 10 predictions. Click here to see our 10 predictions